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A novel eye-tracked measure of pupil diameter oscillation is derived as an indicator of cognitive load. The new metric, termed the Low/High Index of Pupillary Activity (LHIPA), is able to discriminate cognitive load (vis-à-vis task difficulty) in several experiments where the Index of Pupillary Activity fails to do so. Rationale for the LHIPA is tied to the functioning of the human autonomic nervous system yielding a hybrid measure based on the ratio of Low/High frequencies of pupil oscillation. The paper’s contribution is twofold. First, full documentation is provided for the calculation of the LHIPA. As with the IPA, it is possible for researchers to apply this metric to their own experiments where a measure of cognitive load is of interest. Second, robustness of the LHIPA is shown in analysis of three experiments, a restrictive fixed-gaze number counting task, a less restrictive fixed-gaze n-back task, and an applied eye-typing task. 

A variety of psychological disorders like antisocial personality disorder have been linked to impairments in facial emotion recognition. Exploring eye movements during categorization of emotional faces is a promising approach with the potential to reveal possible differences in cognitive processes underlying these deficits. Based on this premise we investigated whether antisocial violent offenders exhibit different scan patterns compared to a matched healthy control group while categorizing emotional faces. Group differences were analyzed in terms of attention to the eyes, extent of exploration behavior and structure of switching patterns between Areas of Interest. While we were not able to show clear group differences, the present study is one of the first that demonstrates the feasibility and utility of incorporating recently developed eye movement metrics such as gaze transition entropy into clinical psychology.