What is it about?
Feeling unwell – whether from illness or motion – is a universal experience. Signals from the body profoundly shape cognition, emotion, and decision-making. We wondered how nausea changes visual exploration of the environment. We electrically stimulated the vestibular system of healthy volunteers to induce dizziness and nausea, while monitoring gaze during free viewing of affective images. The stronger the nausea, the more visual exploration was guided by objectively salient visual features, especially for highly arousing images. Pupillometry revealed larger pupils, consistent with heightened arousal, and disrupted pupillary responses to affective pictures, showing less room for processing emotions. We conclude that nausea may dull perception, but strengthens its grip on physical reality.
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Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Feeling nauseous is such a universal experience that we believe this question is broadly relevant. In addition, GVS is increasingly used in applied settings, such as medical rehabilitation (e.g., for vestibular and neurologic disorders) or the gaming industry (e.g., to create immersive experiences). It is therefore important and timely to better understand its impact on basic oculomotor and affective processes. Overall, our results show that perception of the environment literally depends on how we feel inside, highlighting a fundamental interaction between our body, brain, and the world we live in.
Perspectives
The systematic oculomotor effects of vestibular stimulation are well known. However, the literature has generally assumed these biases to be largely reactive (that is, passive consequences of the stimulation). Here, using a more ecological approach – namely, free viewing of images – we provide evidence for an adaptive component: depending on the context and on the strength of nausea, visual sampling and exploration are progressively driven towards more salient low-level image features. This is a potentially important information for the management of nauseous states. Moreover, results provide a nice experimental grounding to the popular and intuitive notion that how we process external events strictly depends on our predisposition (e.g., “We don't see things as they are; we see them as we are”, attributed to Anaïs Nin).
Elvio Blini
INSERM U1028, ImpAct, and Lyon Neuroscience Center
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Nausea reshapes visual exploration and pupillary responses to affective images, July 2026, openRxiv,
DOI: 10.64898/2026.07.17.739163.
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