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To evaluate the blinking pattern during and after cognitive processing, 10 subjects' eyeblinks were recorded by a videotape recording camera placed 100 cm from the subjects' side. The subjects' task was to discriminate two kinds of auditory tones presented serially and to discriminate two kinds of visual stimuli presented serially. Treatments were composed of the baseline condition preexperiment, the visual task with no discrimination, the visual discriminative task, the auditory task with no discrimination, and the auditory discriminative task. The blink rate in each treatment, the temporal distribution of blinks poststimulus, and the blink waveform were evaluated. Although blinks were not inhibited during tasks, frequent blinks after tasks were observed in both modalities. Blinks concentrated between 300 msec. and 800 msec. after the discriminated stimulus and formulated the blink-rate peak. The closing velocity of lid in the blink rate peak was lower after auditory stimulus. Moreover, the lid's opening velocity after the auditory discrimination was higher. These results indicated that the eyelid closed slowly and opened quickly after the auditory discriminative stimulus.

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Effects of stimulus modality, information processing activity and motor response on the blink rate were examined. In Experiment 1, visual and auditory stimuli were employed. The blink rate peaked just after a stimulus and then progressively decreased until thenext stimulus. The changes in the blink rate were similar for both the visual and the auditory stimulus conditions. In Experiment 2, only auditory stimuli were given to examine the effects of discriminative responses and motor responses on the blink rate. The heights of peaks increased as the processing load increased, while the motor responses had no effect on the post-stimulus peaks. Attention level was used to explain the pre-stimulus attenuation, and processing load to the post-stimulus peaks.

Adsorption behavior and stabilization/destabilization effects of 2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate（HEMA）on a bovine tendon collagen（BTC） （type I） , either native（N）or thermally denatured（D） , were studied by IR spectroscopy and differential scanning calorimetry（DSC） . The amount of HEMA adsorbed was larger on BTC （D）than on BTC （N） , because BTC （D）had a larger specific surface area（SSA）as revealed from SSA measurement. Denaturation temperature（T d ）of BTC （N） , measured by DSC in aqueous HEMA solution, decreased from 63℃ to 40℃ with increasing HEMA concentration（C HEMA ）up to 20 wt％. This destabilization might be caused by the loss of hydrophobic stabilization of the helix structure as C HEMA was increased. At C HEMA ＞20 wt％, the structure of collagen was restabilized presumably due to the dehydration effect conferred by HEMA at higher concentration. BTC （D）with little helix content, however, showed only a weak endothermic peak in the DSC measurement and the T d at 40℃ was independent of C HEMA .