New Paper by Johannes in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience

Fantastic news: Johannes’ 2nd publication of the year was accepted!! “Pupil dilation reflects effortful action invigoration in overcoming aversive Pavlovian biases” is now available in the Journal of Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience. In this study, Johannes measured pupil size and movement with an eye-tracker while participants played the Motivational Go/NoGo Learning Task (see a demo here). When participants were confronted with the threat of punishment, their pupil motion ‘stopped’ very briefly, reminiscent of freezing responses under threat. Johannes also found that pupil size increased when they then managed to overcome their inhibition to act (elicited by the threat).  Pupil size might thus reflect the physical effort people need to recruit in order to boost one response option over another.

If you are intrigued, you can read the entire paper here, and you can even access and play with the data and code from the experiment!