An implicit representation of stimulus ambiguity in pupil size

Jackson Graves (), Paul Egré (), Daniel Pressnitzer () and Vincent de Gardelle
Additional contact information
Jackson Graves: LSP - Laboratoire des systèmes perceptifs - DEC - Département d'Etudes Cognitives - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Paul Egré: IJN - Institut Jean-Nicod - DEC - Département d'Etudes Cognitives - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CdF (institution) - Collège de France - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Département de Philosophie - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres
Daniel Pressnitzer: LSP - Laboratoire des systèmes perceptifs - DEC - Département d'Etudes Cognitives - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) from HAL

Abstract: To guide behavior, perceptual systems must operate on intrinsically ambiguous sensory input. Observers are usually able to acknowledge the uncertainty of their perception, but in some cases, they critically fail to do so. Here, we show that a physiological correlate of ambiguity can be found in pupil dilation even when the observer is not aware of such ambiguity. We used a well-known auditory ambiguous stimulus, known as the tritone paradox, which can induce the perception of an upward or downward pitch shift within the same individual. In two experiments, behavioral responses showed that listeners could not explicitly access the ambiguity in this stimulus, even though their responses varied from trial to trial. However, pupil dilation was larger for the more ambiguous cases. The ambiguity of the stimulus for each listener was indexed by the entropy of behavioral responses, and this entropy was also a significant predictor of pupil size. In particular, entropy explained additional variation in pupil size independent of the explicit judgment of confidence in the specific situation that we investigated, in which the two measures were decoupled. Our data thus suggest that stimulus ambiguity is implicitly represented in the brain even without explicit awareness of this ambiguity.

Keywords: ambiguity; uncertainty; confidence; auditory perception; pupillometry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-11
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021, 118 (48), ⟨10.1073/pnas.2107997118⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Working Paper: An implicit representation of stimulus ambiguity in pupil size (2021)
Working Paper: An implicit representation of stimulus ambiguity in pupil size (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:cesptp:hal-03448538

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2107997118

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().