Temporal alignment of pupillary response with stimulus events via deconvolution

Abstract

Analysis of pupil dilation has been used as an index of attentional effort in the auditory domain. Previous work has modeled the pupillary response to attentional effort as a linear time-invariant system with a characteristic impulse response, and used deconvolution to estimate the attentional effort that gives rise to changes in pupil size. Here it is argued that one parameter of the impulse response (the latency of response maximum, tmax) has been mis-estimated in the literature; a different estimate is presented, and it is shown how deconvolution with this value of tmax yields more intuitively plausible and informative results.