September 2019
Spotlight Summary by Manuel Spitschan
Effects of spatial frequency and attention on pupillary response
It is well known that light intensity changes the size of the pupil, ranging from 9 mm in the dark to 2 mm in bright daylight. Many past studies examined this relationship using homogeneous, uniform surfaces. But our view of the world is rarely uniform, but instead contains spatial details at different scales. In this work, Hu and colleagues examine the role of spatial frequency in driving pupil responses using grating stimuli and natural images filtered in specific spatial scales. Crucially, their results show that at the same mean luminance, varying the spatial frequency content can lead to differential pupil responses. A privileged role is played here by mid-range spatial frequencies. The work contributes to a line of research challenging the notion that mean luminance is sufficient to predict pupil size. Since Hu et al. apply grayscale stimuli, future work could tease apart the role that the different photoreceptors play (long, medium, and short cones, and melanopsin-containing retinal ganglion cells) in driving the spatial frequency response. An application of this finding is measuring visual acuity objectively (without relying on subjective responses of the observer) and human-computer interaction.
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Article Information
Effects of spatial frequency and attention on pupillary response
Xiaofei Hu, Rumi Hisakata, and Hirohiko Kaneko
J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 36(10) 1699-1708 (2019) View: Abstract | HTML | PDF