Abstract
Spontaneous eye blink rate (sEBR) has been linked to attention and memory, specifically working memory (WM). sEBR is also related to striatal dopamine (DA) activity with schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease showing increases and decreases, respectively, in sEBR. A weakness of past studies of sEBR and WM is that correlations have been reported using blink rates taken at baseline either before or after performance of the tasks used to assess WM. The goal of the present study was to understand how fluctuations in sEBR during different phases of a visual WM task predict task accuracy. In two experiments, with recordings of sEBR collected inside and outside of a magnetic resonance imaging bore, we observed sEBR to be positively correlated with WM task accuracy during the WM delay period. We also found task-related modulation of sEBR, including higher sEBR during the delay period compared to rest, and lower sEBR during task phases (e.g., stimulus encoding) that place demands on visual attention. These results provide further evidence that sEBR could be an important predictor of WM task performance with the changes during the delay period suggesting a role in WM maintenance. The relationship of sEBR to DA activity and WM maintenance is discussed.
Highlights
The healthy human blinks around 15–20 times per minute (Tsubota et al, 1996), the precorneal tear film, which lubricates the eye, only begins drying up approximately 25 s after a blink ends (Norn, 1969)
These results provide further evidence that spontaneous eye blink rate (sEBR) could be an important predictor of working memory (WM) task performance with the changes during the delay period suggesting a role in WM maintenance
Experiment 1 In Experiment 1, we examined the relationship between sEBR and WM task performance while the duration of the WM delay period interval was varied
Summary
The healthy human blinks around 15–20 times per minute (Tsubota et al, 1996), the precorneal tear film, which lubricates the eye, only begins drying up approximately 25 s after a blink ends (Norn, 1969). This suggests that we blink more often than needed to maintain a lubricated precorneal tear film. Previous research has found task-related modulation of spontaneous eye blink rate (sEBR), which indicates that blinking could be reflective of cognitive factors (Siegle et al, 2008; Oh et al, 2012). A growing body of literature continues to provide evidence supporting
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