Coordination effort in joint action is reflected in pupil size

Pupil-BLAH-metry: cognitive effort in speech planning reflected by pupil dilation.

In reading research, a longstanding question is whether any stages of lexical processing require central attention, and whether such potential demands are frequency-sensitive. In the present study, we examined the allocation of cognitive effort in lexical processing by examining pupil dilations and naming latencies in a modified delayed naming procedure. In this dual-task/change procedure, part...

Pupil size variations correlate with physical effort perception

It has long been established that the pupil diameter increases during mental activities in proportion to the difficulty of the task at hand. However, it is still unclear whether this relationship between the pupil size and effort applies also to physical effort. In order to address this issue, we asked healthy volunteers to perform a power grip task, at varied intensity, while evaluating their ...

Pupil size in diabetes.

Sympathetic function was studied in 101 diabetic children and 102 age and sex matched control children, as part of a longitudinal study of the evolution of microvascular disease in the population of diabetic children and adolescents in Avon County. The median (range) age of the diabetic population was 13.5 (6.0-17.2) years, the duration of diabetes was 4.0 (0.4-13.9) years, and glycated haemogl...

Your Effort is Showing! Pupil Dilation Reveals Memory Heuristics

Online social network size is reflected in human brain structure

The increasing ubiquity of web-based social networking services is a striking feature of modern human society. The degree to which individuals participate in these networks varies substantially for reasons that are unclear. Here, we show a biological basis for such variability by demonstrating that quantitative variation in the number of friends an individual declares on a web-based social netw...