Workshops

The role of pupil size in visual perception

Sebastiaan Mathôt 

University of Groningen

Visual perception starts as soon as light passes through the lens of the eye, before even touching the retina. Large pupils allow more light to enter the eye, thus enhancing visual sensitivity. Small pupils allow light to be better focused, thus enhancing visual acuity. Vision scientists rarely consider this earliest level of visual processing, yet it is a crucial component of vision. Foreshadowing the pupillometry symposium on Sunday, I will review a series of studies describing how pupil size affects visual processing at different levels: retina, visual cortex, and behavior. I will also describe how higher-level cognition affects pupil size, and how this (in some cases) reflects a form sensory tuning: a subtle adjustment of pupil size to meet the demands of the current situation and the immediate future. 

Sebastiaan Mathôt is an associate professor at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. His research focuses on visual perception with a specific focus on pupil size and visual attention. He is also actively involved in the development of open-source scientific software, the best known of which is OpenSesame, a tool for building psychology experiments.