Eye tracking is more sensitive than skin conductance response in detecting mild environmental stimuli

The skin conductance (SC) and eye tracking data are two potential arousal-related psychophysiological signals that can serve as the interoceptive unconditioned response (UR) to aversive stimuli (e.g., electric shocks). The current research investigates the sensitivity of these signals in detecting mild electric shock by decoding the hidden arousal and interoceptive awareness (IA) states. While well-established frameworks exist to decode the arousal state from the SC signal, there is a lack of a systematic approach that decodes the IA state from pupillometry and eye gaze measurements. We extract the physiological-based features from eye tracking data to recover the IA-related neural activity. Employing a Bayesian filtering framework, we decode the IA state in fear conditioning and extinction experiments where mild electric shock is used. We independently decode the underlying arousal state using binary and marked point process (MPP) observations derived from concurrently collected SC data. 8 of 11 subjects present a significantly (p-value < 0.001) higher IA state in trials that were always accompanied by electric shock (CS + US+) compared to trials that were never accompanied by electric shock (CS−). According to the decoded SC-based arousal state, only 5 (binary observation) and 4 (MPP observation) subjects present a significantly higher arousal state in CS + US+ trials than CS− trials. In conclusion, the decoded hidden brain state from eye tracking data better agrees with the presented mild stimuli. Tracking IA state from eye tracking data can lead to the development of contactless monitors for neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders.