Changes in blink rate during signal discrimination tasks

Abstract

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.

Threshold-varying integrate-and-fire model reproduces distributions of spontaneous blink intervals

“…The results of numerical simulations in this study suggest that the variable threshold plays a critical role in producing a variety of IBI distributions, especially for the bimodal distribution. Numerous experimental studies have revealed that the blink rates are regulated by internal states of the participants during performing cognitive tasks (e.g., [ 6 , 11 ]). While we assumed that the variable threshold represented particular physiological fluctuations, a few plausible candidates of human internal states exist.…”

“…In recent years, it has been hypothesized that such frequent blinking could play an important role in adaptive human behaviours [ 4 ], [ 5 ]. Participants in a laboratory experiment tended to blink immediately after the emergence of intermittently presented visual stimuli [ 6 ] indicating that people reliably receive visual information avoiding oversight errors. Similarly, researchers have reported that viewers were likely to blink at implicit breaks in expert storytelling performances [ 7 ].…”

“…A realistic model should account for this variation. In addition to such temporal characteristics, changes in blinking rates often provide less common distributions of inter-blink intervals (IBIs) in cognitive tasks [ 6 ], [ 11 ]. Thus, an adequate model should reproduce the diverse distributions of spontaneous blinking.…”

Research on task complexity as a foundation for augmented cognition

“…Pupil dilation and blinks rate have reflected variations in the subjects' cognitive demands or processing load on varied tasks such as translation language processing, reasoning, perception, sustained attention, and selective attention [8,40,36].…”

Rapid serial blinks: An index of temporally increased cognitive load

“…In experiments, blink rates immediately increase after finishing cognitive tasks while blinks are suppressed during cognitive events. In the experiments, the number of sequential blinks, referred as “bursts” or “flurries”, correlates with the degree of cognitive load [10]. Most recently, a study revealed that human can learn to use strategic blinking to maximize obtained visual information under the constraint to keep humidity of eye surfaces [11].…”