Do Emotional Faces Modulate Pupillary Pseudoneglect?

Pseudoneglect, a subtle attentional bias toward the left visual field in neurotypicalindividuals, can be measured with a split-screen paradigm in which a bright stimulus inone hemifield elicits stronger pupil constriction when it appears on the left than on theright (Strauch et al., 2022). Replications of this method have reported mixed results,including a large Registered Report that replicated the effect with a small effect size (d= -0.31). Given strong left-field biases in the emotional chimeric face test, the presentstudy (n = 53) combined this task with split-screen pupillometry to test whetheremotional face processing amplifies pupillary pseudoneglect. Pupillary pseudoneglectwas observed during control trials with scrambled faces (d = -0.36) and was numericallystronger for emotional faces (d = -0.76), but this difference was not significant. A strongleft-field bias was confirmed for emotional face judgements (d = -0.76), which did notcorrelate with pupillary bias (ρ = -0.26), and for a line bisection task (d = -0.47), whichalso did not correlate with pupillary pseudoneglect (ρ = -0.19). These data support thesplit-screen pupillometric method for measuring pseudoneglect and replicate the patternthat leftward biases across tasks show little statistical relation to one another.