| Abstract | Objective. Mental effort can be defined as the mental activity (or “concentration”) associated with the completion of a complex task. Pupil size has been shown to increase incrementally as a reflection of mental processing demands. For example, when concentrating during a complex speech perception task or serial subtraction task. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine whether this pupillary response can be found in association with voice production tasks of varying difficulty.
Method: 10 adults (age, sex) were recorded performing while sitting in silence, counting aloud in their habitual voice, and counting aloud in a variety of non-habitual target voice qualities (breathy, twang and fry). Pupil size was measured via standard pupillometry equipment with participants seated in consistent room light facing a non-reflective charcoal grey wall. For each target voice, an alternating sequence of silence, habitual voice, silence and target voice production was recorded, such that each recording included 3 exemplars of habitual voice, 3 exemplars of target voice, and periods of sitting in silence between each condition over a period of six and a half minutes.
Results/conclusion. There were 3 findings. First, for the majority of participants, baseline pupil diameter was smallest during the initial 30 second rest period at the start of the recording session. Over time, participants could not return to their initial baseline, although sitting in silence was associated on average with smaller pupil diameter. 2) in participants whose baseline pupil diameter was large, little variation was seen between different voice conditions (a ceiling effect). In participants whose baseline pupil diameter was low, pupil diameter was larger for habitual counting and greatest for counting in the target voice, There was substantial variability within and between participants. As a conclusion, pupillometry shows potential for capturing mental effort associated with implementation of voice production technique,
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