Cargando…

The confounding effects of eye blinking on pupillometry, and their remedy

Pupillometry, thanks to its strong relationship with cognitive factors and recent advancements in measuring techniques, has become popular among cognitive or neural scientists as a tool for studying the physiological processes involved in mental or neural processes. Despite this growing popularity o...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Yoo, Kyung, Ahn, Jeongyeol, Lee, Sang-Hun
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8683032/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34919586
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261463
_version_ 1784617331461193728
author Yoo, Kyung
Ahn, Jeongyeol
Lee, Sang-Hun
author_facet Yoo, Kyung
Ahn, Jeongyeol
Lee, Sang-Hun
author_sort Yoo, Kyung
collection PubMed
description Pupillometry, thanks to its strong relationship with cognitive factors and recent advancements in measuring techniques, has become popular among cognitive or neural scientists as a tool for studying the physiological processes involved in mental or neural processes. Despite this growing popularity of pupillometry, the methodological understanding of pupillometry is limited, especially regarding potential factors that may threaten pupillary measurements’ validity. Eye blinking can be a factor because it frequently occurs in a manner dependent on many cognitive components and induces a pulse-like pupillary change consisting of constriction and dilation with substantive magnitude and length. We set out to characterize the basic properties of this “blink-locked pupillary response (BPR),” including the shape and magnitude of BPR and their variability across subjects and blinks, as the first step of studying the confounding nature of eye blinking. Then, we demonstrated how the dependency of eye blinking on cognitive factors could confound, via BPR, the pupillary responses that are supposed to reflect the cognitive states of interest. By building a statistical model of how the confounding effects of eye blinking occur, we proposed a probabilistic-inference algorithm of de-confounding raw pupillary measurements and showed that the proposed algorithm selectively removed BPR and enhanced the statistical power of pupillometry experiments. Our findings call for attention to the presence and confounding nature of BPR in pupillometry. The algorithm we developed here can be used as an effective remedy for the confounding effects of BPR on pupillometry.
format Online
Article
Text
id pubmed-8683032
institution National Center for Biotechnology Information
language English
publishDate 2021
publisher Public Library of Science
record_format MEDLINE/PubMed
spelling pubmed-86830322021-12-18 The confounding effects of eye blinking on pupillometry, and their remedy Yoo, Kyung Ahn, Jeongyeol Lee, Sang-Hun PLoS One Research Article Pupillometry, thanks to its strong relationship with cognitive factors and recent advancements in measuring techniques, has become popular among cognitive or neural scientists as a tool for studying the physiological processes involved in mental or neural processes. Despite this growing popularity of pupillometry, the methodological understanding of pupillometry is limited, especially regarding potential factors that may threaten pupillary measurements’ validity. Eye blinking can be a factor because it frequently occurs in a manner dependent on many cognitive components and induces a pulse-like pupillary change consisting of constriction and dilation with substantive magnitude and length. We set out to characterize the basic properties of this “blink-locked pupillary response (BPR),” including the shape and magnitude of BPR and their variability across subjects and blinks, as the first step of studying the confounding nature of eye blinking. Then, we demonstrated how the dependency of eye blinking on cognitive factors could confound, via BPR, the pupillary responses that are supposed to reflect the cognitive states of interest. By building a statistical model of how the confounding effects of eye blinking occur, we proposed a probabilistic-inference algorithm of de-confounding raw pupillary measurements and showed that the proposed algorithm selectively removed BPR and enhanced the statistical power of pupillometry experiments. Our findings call for attention to the presence and confounding nature of BPR in pupillometry. The algorithm we developed here can be used as an effective remedy for the confounding effects of BPR on pupillometry. Public Library of Science 2021-12-17 /pmc/articles/PMC8683032/ /pubmed/34919586 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261463 Text en © 2021 Yoo et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Yoo, Kyung
Ahn, Jeongyeol
Lee, Sang-Hun
The confounding effects of eye blinking on pupillometry, and their remedy
title The confounding effects of eye blinking on pupillometry, and their remedy
title_full The confounding effects of eye blinking on pupillometry, and their remedy
title_fullStr The confounding effects of eye blinking on pupillometry, and their remedy
title_full_unstemmed The confounding effects of eye blinking on pupillometry, and their remedy
title_short The confounding effects of eye blinking on pupillometry, and their remedy
title_sort confounding effects of eye blinking on pupillometry, and their remedy
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8683032/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34919586
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261463
work_keys_str_mv AT yookyung theconfoundingeffectsofeyeblinkingonpupillometryandtheirremedy
AT ahnjeongyeol theconfoundingeffectsofeyeblinkingonpupillometryandtheirremedy
AT leesanghun theconfoundingeffectsofeyeblinkingonpupillometryandtheirremedy
AT yookyung confoundingeffectsofeyeblinkingonpupillometryandtheirremedy
AT ahnjeongyeol confoundingeffectsofeyeblinkingonpupillometryandtheirremedy
AT leesanghun confoundingeffectsofeyeblinkingonpupillometryandtheirremedy