  Cognitive processes involved in both allocation of attention during decision
making as well as surprise when making mistakes trigger release of the
neurotransmitter norepinephrine, which has been shown to be correlated with an
increase in pupil dilation, in turn reflecting raised levels of arousal.
Extending earlier experiments based on the Attention Network Test (ANT),
separating the neural components of alertness and spatial re-orientation from
the attention involved in more demanding conflict resolution tasks, we
demonstrate that these signatures of attention are so robust that they may be
retrieved even when applying low cost eye tracking in an everyday mobile
computing context. Furthermore we find that the reaction of surprise elicited
when committing mistakes in a decision task, which in the neuroimaging EEG
literature have been referred to as a negativity feedback error correction
signal, may likewise be retrieved solely based on an increase in pupil
dilation.
