Beyond eye gaze: What else can eyetracking reveal about cognition and cognitive development?

This review provides an introduction to two eyetracking measures that can be used to study cognitive development and plasticity: pupil dilation and spontaneous blink rate. We begin by outlining the rich history of gaze analysis, which can reveal the current focus of attention as well as cognitive strategies. We then turn to the two lesser-utilized ocular measures.

Characterizing Behavioral and Brain Changes Associated with Practicing Reasoning Skills.

We have reported previously that intensive preparation for a standardized test that taxes reasoning leads to changes in structural and functional connectivity within the frontoparietal network. Here, we investigated whether reasoning instruction transfers to improvement on unpracticed tests of reasoning, and whether these improvements are associated with changes in neural recruitment during reasoning task performance. We found behavioral evidence for transfer to a transitive inference task, but no evidence for transfer to a rule generation task.

Task-evoked pupillometry provides a window into the development of short-term memory capacity.

The capacity to keep multiple items in short-term memory (STM) improves over childhood and provides the foundation for the development of multiple cognitive abilities. The goal of this study was to measure the extent to which age differences in STM capacity are related to differences in task engagement during encoding. Children (n = 69, mean age = 10.

Intensive reasoning training alters patterns of brain connectivity at rest.

Patterns of correlated activity among brain regions reflect functionally relevant networks that are widely assumed to be stable over time. We hypothesized that if these correlations reflect the prior history of coactivation of brain regions, then a marked shift in cognition could alter the strength of coupling between these regions. We sought to test whether intensive reasoning training in humans would result in tighter coupling among regions in the lateral frontoparietal network, as measured with resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI).