Bos, Meinris, van den (2022) Probing working memory through pupillometry. Master thesis, Psychology.
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Abstract
Besides responding to light, the pupil responds to a wide variety of cognitive processes such as emotions, attention, effort, imagination. More recently it was also found that changes in pupil size reflect the contents of information that is encoded and maintained in visual working memory (VWM). However, it was found that the effects of maintaining bright vs dark information on pupil size attenuate within seconds. Recent studies have suggested that, under certain circumstances, maintenance in VWM is done in activity-silent hidden states, meaning that information is not actively maintained in neural activity patterns. As hidden states cannot be measured through traditional recording methods, a measuring paradigm called pinging was devised: by briefly flashing a task neutral visual impulse, or “ping”, task-evoked neural activity is elicited, and from this activity the content of VWM can be decoded. The goal of this study is to investigate whether the contents of VWM can be revealed in the pupil through pinging. In our experiment participants memorised bright or dark stimuli. Which stimulus had to be remembered, and thus maintained in VWM, was either cued before stimuli presentation or after stimulus presentation. To reveal the contents of VWM, after memorization, a task-neutral impulse stimulus was briefly displayed. Although we did find that pupil size reflects encoding of information in VWM, we did not find significant effects for maintenance, nor did we find significant effects after pinging with an impulse stimulus. As items maintained in VWM are not reliably reflected in changes of pupil size, we can conclude that for now the hidden states of VWM remain hidden from pupillometry.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Master) |
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| Supervisor name: | Mathot, S. |
| Degree programme: | Psychology |
| Differentiation route: | Cognitive Psychology and Psychophysiology (CPP) [Master Psychology] |
| Date Deposited: | 10 Aug 2022 09:04 |
| Last Modified: | 10 Aug 2022 09:04 |
| URI: | http://gmwpublic.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/1259 |
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