Novelty and emotion: Pupillary and cortical responses during viewing of natural scenes

•The LPP and pupil were co-registered during free-viewing of natural scenes.•The LPP was larger when novel pictures depicted emotional vs. neutral content.•The pupil size was larger when novel pictures depicted emotional vs. neutral content.•The affective modulation of the LPP was preserved with massed repetition.•The affective modulation of the pupil diameter habituated with massed repetition. Given the remarkable similarities in the antecedent conditions—stimulus motivational relevance and novelty (i.e., probability of occurrence)—that elicit amplitude modulation of the late positive potential (LPP) and the pupillary dilation response, the present study examines whether these two indexes of orienting response reflect common processes that are responsible for modulatory patterns in motivationally relevant contexts. In the present study, the LPP and the pupillary dilation response were co-registered in a free-picture viewing context in which stimulus novelty was manipulated through repeated presentation of the same picture exemplar. More specifically, pictures depicting both emotional and neutral contents could be novel, that is never seen before in the course of the study, or repeated 4–8 times in a row (i.e., massed repetition). Results showed that, despite massed repetitions, the late positive potential amplitude continued to be highly modulated by picture content, whereas affective modulation of pupil dilation decreased with picture repetition. These findings indicate that, although the LPP and pupil dilation are similarly affected by motivational relevance during the viewing of novel pictures, they differ when pictures are highly familiar, possibly reflecting different functional meanings in the context of the orienting response.