Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Huber, Stefan E.
• Martini, Markus
• Sachse, Pierre

Titel

Task-synchronized eye blink modulation neither requires visual stimulation nor active motor response and is modulated by task predictability

Ist Teil von

• International journal of psychophysiology, 2023-05, Vol.187, p.1-10

Ort / Verlag

Netherlands: Elsevier B.V

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• It has been repeatedly shown that temporal task features are reflected in eye blink dynamics during attention tasks. Eye blinks occur with increased likeliness particularly when demands on external attention allocation are low. Both predictive, top-down and reactive, bottom-up processes were shown to be involved in blink regulation. However, whether temporal stimulus prediction is a generally active component of the attention system or rather specific to the visual domain has not been fully elaborated yet. By monitoring eye blinking of 99 students during an auditory attention task and analyzing particularly the dynamics of eye blink onsets relative to stimuli timings, we show here that prediction does, in principle, not require visual stimulation, and is also not merely a consequence of the involvement of manual responses during the task. We further show that both the inclusion of manual response to stimuli and elevated task predictability enhance the prediction component reflected in eye blink dynamics, whereas for the latter we experimentally manipulate objective task predictability by adjusting the frequency dependence of the power spectral densities of the series of inter-stimulus time intervals. This allows us finally to explain why, for specific choices of experimental conditions, the generally active and present prediction component involved in attention can become difficult to detect in non-visual, auditory tasks. Conversely, this comes with the important implication that, if tasks aim for elaborating particularly temporal prediction, distributing stimuli over time such that inter-stimulus-intervals conform to a sample of Gaussian noise represents a specifically unfavorable choice. •The dynamics of eye blinking reflects temporal stimulus prediction.•Prediction and blinking are associated also in purely auditory attention tasks.•The association between blinking and prediction is not mediated by manual response.•Enhancing objective task predictability enhances the association.•Tasks probing temporal prediction should consider the dependence on predictability.