Let Your Eyes Predict: Prediction Accuracy of Pupillary Responses to Random Alerting and Neutral Sounds
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Plain English Summary
Here's a wild one: can your eyes somehow know what's coming before it happens? Eighty people listened to a random mix of startling and calm sounds while a high-tech eye tracker watched their pupils. The remarkable finding: pupil size during the two seconds before a loud alerting sound predicted it with 60% accuracy — ten points above chance. That might sound small, but statistically it was enormous, with Bayesian odds over 3,000 to 1 in favor of a real effect. Calm sounds? No such prediction, right at chance. Even more fascinating, when researchers checked whether people were just guessing based on patterns (the gambler's fallacy — expecting the opposite of what just happened), they found that bias actually worked against the effect, meaning the true anticipatory signal hiding in the pupils may be even stronger than measured.
Research Notes
Extends the presentiment/PAA paradigm from skin conductance and heart rate to pupil dilation, achieving a notably large effect (60% hit rate) with strong Bayesian support (BF₁₀ > 3,000). One of the constituent studies in the Mossbridge et al. 2012 meta-analysis. Relevant to Controversy #3 (presentiment); later cited by Houran et al. 2018 in their critique of the PAA literature.
Eighty participants (40 male, 40 female) listened to pseudorandom sequences of 10 alerting and 10 neutral IADS sounds while pupil dilation was recorded via Tobii T120 eye-tracker. Anticipatory pupil diameter during a 2-second pre-stimulus window was compared to individually calibrated baselines to predict the upcoming sound category. Alerting sounds were predicted at 60.3% accuracy (z = 5.76, p = 4.2 × 10⁻⁹; BF₁₀ = 3,225), ~10% above chance; neutral sounds at chance (44.6%). Effect size d = 0.33, 95% CI [0.10, 0.55]. Gambler's Fallacy analysis showed expectations actually suppressed alerting predictions, suggesting the true anticipatory signal may be stronger.
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Cited By
- Experimental Investigation of Precognition in Yoga Practitioners — Alibalaei, Hassan (2025)
- Predictive Physiological Anticipation Preceding Seemingly Unpredictable Stimuli: An Update of Mossbridge et al.'s Meta-Analysis — Duggan, Michael (2018)
- Cross-Examining the Case for Precognition: Comment on Mossbridge and Radin (2018) — Houran, James (2018)
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📋 Cite this paper
Tressoldi, Patrizio E, Martinelli, Massimiliano, Semenzato, Luca, Cappato, Sara (2011). Let Your Eyes Predict: Prediction Accuracy of Pupillary Responses to Random Alerting and Neutral Sounds. SAGE Open. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244011420451
@article{tressoldi_2011_your,
title = {Let Your Eyes Predict: Prediction Accuracy of Pupillary Responses to Random Alerting and Neutral Sounds},
author = {Tressoldi, Patrizio E and Martinelli, Massimiliano and Semenzato, Luca and Cappato, Sara},
year = {2011},
journal = {SAGE Open},
doi = {10.1177/2158244011420451},
}