Understanding Effects of Cognitive Load from Pupillary Responses Using Hilbert Analytic Phase

Task-evoked pupillary responses reveal the relationship between working memory capacity and its effect on cognitive states. Understanding the effects of cognitive load requires robust analysis of pupillary responses. In this paper, we introduced a Hilbert transform analytic phase based method to compute temporal patterns from pupillary responses. Analysis reveals that sharp change in incorrect task response may be attributed to the cognitive overload. It was also observed that a sharp change and continuation of the ramp in Hilbert unwrapped phase relates to the cognitive dissonance.