Bachelor and Master Theses

Investigating pupil-linked arousal responses to changes in environmental statistics

A growing body of study demonstrates that humans track statistical regularities in their environments and build models to cope with uncertainties in the world. However, as with every model, mental models of agents encounter uncertainties due to changes in environmental statistics. Uncertainties offer risk and/or opportunity, therefore mandating arousal, and require internal models of environmental regularities to be either updated or changed with an alternative. LC-NE is thought to regulate such arousal and model updating and replacement in the brain. Since LC-NE also has a correlational relationship with pupil dilation responses, those responses can be used to infer the time-dependent activity of the LC-NE while uncertainties occur.

In this bachelor thesis, you will present auditory and/or visual patterns to participants and measure their pupil responses to changes in environmental statistics as a result of the model maintenance process.

You will work with Hamit Basgol in order to design a new experiment and analyze its results in Python/Psychopy. If you are interested, please get in touch with Hamit Basgol, hamit.basgoel@uni-tuebingen.de