Alexandre Zénon

Symposium Description

Psychophysiology relies on the measure physiological bases underlying psychological processes. Some of them have become regular methods to use, such as EEG, neuroimaging, EDA, or also HR measure. However, the number of physiological parameters that could be linked to psychological aspects is only increasing with the recent research, along with technological advancement to measure those parameters, or to refine popular methods. This symposium proposes to present one of these new methods, the pupillometry, along with some other methods or examples by early-career speakers. The pupillometry will be presented by Dr. Alexandre Zénon, who is using this method to measure cognition-based changes and put them into an information-theoretic frame of work. 

Talk: "Pupil dilatation indexes information gain"

Under constant lighting conditions, the diameter of the eye pupil, thought to index brain arousal, varies in response to many cognitive variables, such as attention, task difficulty, surprise, urgency, etc. In this presentation, I will show that these cognition-induced pupillary dilations have a quantitative relationship with information gain, an information-theoretic measure of task complexity that corresponds to the magnitude of the update between prior and posterior beliefs. I will introduce the theoretical concepts and will present some of the experimental evidence supporting this hypothesis. I will then discuss how it has the potential to explain the ensemble of relationships shown so far between cognition and pupillary dilation.