10 seconds: The possible time scale of attention and memory fluctuations

What is it about?

Even if you try to maintain your attention and memory perfectly, there will be fluctuations in your performance. Do the neural fluctuations that support these functions have specific temporal characteristics? We found that slow fluctuations in human pupil diameter show an upward trend over 10 seconds when attention and memory performance are impaired.

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Photo by David Matos on Unsplash

Photo by David Matos on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Our findings enable estimating cognitive performance during visual tasks, even when rapid pupil changes (less than 10 seconds) occur due to luminance fluctuations. Pupil trends may objectively measure a user's internal performance fluctuations. Real-time assistant technology based on such metrics would be beneficial for tasks such as driving, where human errors can have fatal consequences.