Cambria Revsine¹, Wilma A. Bainbridge¹; ¹University of Chicago

Pupillometry can provide insight into participants’ underlying cognitive processes, such as effort and attention, while performing a task. However, when used in visual tasks, inherent confounds such as luminance levels complicate conclusions drawn with this measure. Here, we used pupillometry to measure cognitive effort in a purely auditory task, to test whether there is a processing advantage for memorable voices, as has been previously shown in visual stimuli. Participants verbally recalled sentences spoken by speakers with a range of intrinsic memorability scores, as determined in a prior study (Revsine et al., 2025). We found that more memorable speakers elicited smaller pupillary dilations during the stimulus and recall periods, suggesting that they are easier to process. Speaker memorability was also positively predictive of recall accuracy of the sentences. To further investigate these effects, we ran a follow-up experiment containing stimuli of speakers from the extremes of the memorability distribution. While the main effect of voice memorability on memory accuracy failed to replicate, we found an interactive effect between memorability and participants’ overall performance—in other words, speaker memorability boosted recall for participants with poorer memory. Memorability was again negatively associated with pupil size, in the worst performers. This result suggests that in these participants, more efficient processing of memorable voices may free up cognitive resources for remembering content, yet this advantage is less apparent in better performers whose memory abilities may already be at ceiling. Our findings add evidence to a growing account of stimulus memorability as reflecting perceptual processing efficiency, across sensory modalities.