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Pupillometry and Psycholinguistics

2025· reference-entry· en· W4416299395 on OpenAlexaff
Juhani Järvikivi

Bibliographic record

VenueOxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics · 2025
Typereference-entry
Languageen
Field
Topic
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPupillometryPsycholinguisticsPupilPupillary responseCognitionSentenceWord processingTask (project management)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Pupillometry is the scientific study of pupil size changes due to low-level factors like ambient lighting conditions and changes in focal distance, and, more interestingly, due to higher level brain activity and attentional, emotional, or cognitive demands. Because it offers a way to assess cognitive activity, pupillometry has attracted research gauging cognitive processing effort on and off since the 1960s. Due to developments in eye tracking technology and statistical analysis methods, pupillometry has enjoyed a renewed interest as a tool for language processing research since the 2010s. Language processing tasks using Task-Evoked Pupillary Response (TEPR)—measured changes in pupil dilation time-locked to the presentation of a stimulus—have shown that the human pupil responds to and can be used to replicate many of the standard findings in the psycholinguistic literature. For example, pupil size varies with lexical frequency during word processing tasks, showing more dilation for low than for high frequency words. Similarly, changes in pupil size correlate with differences in complexity, ambiguity, predictability, and ease of contextual integration during sentence processing. Perhaps most interestingly, pupillometry responds to processing demands induced by pragmatic inferences. Further, it is sensitive to several individual difference factors, for the investigation of which it offers a non-invasive, task-free method. This is without doubt one of the most attractive sides of pupillometry: it can be used to investigate many factors influencing spoken language processing effort, including pragmatics and socially situated language processes, and it can be used to do so without an explicit task and with natural, felicitous spoken stimuli. However, the literature reporting use of pupillometry in psycholinguistics is still very sparse, so more research is needed to find the areas where pupillometry is both reliable and useful, and where it independently benefits research in language sciences, not just replicates results and phenomena obtained from other, more established methods. Current developments in data preprocessing, statistical methods, and eye tracking technology carry some promise that this time, pupillometry might have come to stay as one more useful method in a psycholinguist’s toolbox.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.009
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.006
Threshold uncertainty score0.020

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.009
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.002
Scholarly communication0.0020.001
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.072
GPT teacher head0.408
Teacher spread0.337 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreReview

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

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Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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