Linking reaction time variability to physiological markers of arousal across timescales

Abstract Reaction time is a measure of the speed of our response to stimuli in the environment. Even for a well-trained task, a subject’s reaction time varies. One source of this variability is internal state fluctuations (such as changes in arousal). There are few studies that systematically quantify the extent to which reaction time varies across different timescales and link this to measures of systemic physiology associated with arousal. In much of the literature, it is assumed but not demonstrated that behavioral and systemic measurements associated with arousal will be consistently linked because both estimate a common underlying arousal process. In this work, we examined this assumption by simultaneously measuring reaction time, heart rate, and pupil diameter in rhesus macaque monkeys performing several visual tasks over hours and across hundreds of sessions. We found a portion of the variability in reaction time could be linked to systemic physiological signatures of arousal on fast timescales from second to second and slower timescales from minute to minute. This link between reaction time and systemic physiology was also present for different biomarkers of arousal (heart rate and pupil). However, the strength of this relationship varied depending on the arousal biomarker. Our findings support the conclusion that there are multiple arousal mechanisms that act simultaneously to influence behavior and multiple timescales at which they operate.