Pupil-Linked Arousal is Predictive of Team Performance in a Virtual Reality (VR) Sensory-Motor Task

The performance of teams can be significantly affected by the physiological arousal of each team member. Pupil dynamics has been shown to index, among other things, arousal. In this paper, we describe a multi-person virtual reality (VR) based sensory-motor task, where individuals must cooperate with each other as co-pilots to navigate a virtual spacecraft. We analyze the relationship between team performance and pupil-linked arousal as a function of the task’s difficulty level. We find that pupil dynamics across the team members is significantly correlated with team performance and task difficulty. We also find that the pupil dynamics of individual team members appear to correlate with situational awareness, where the pupil dynamics of these team members can be used to predict upcoming task success.