College of Medicine, The Catholic University of Korea, Seoul 137-701, Republic of Korea.
Hum Mov Sci. 2012 Dec;31(6):1353-65. doi: 10.1016/j.humov.2012.06.003. Epub 2012 Aug 9.
A number of human behaviors and movements show self-similar temporal patterns in their occurrence over time. Human walking, finger tapping and heartbeat intervals have fluctuations that are statistically similar at multiple time scales. However, whether eye blinking, which is a unique human behavior that occurs spontaneously, embeds a similar temporal structure within other types of movements is largely unknown. In this study, we used attention-requiring tasks to assess how the temporal pattern of eye blinking is altered in both the second and sub-second time scales. Our results showed that eyeblink activity was more suppressed as the task difficulty level increased and was facilitated immediately after exposure to auditory stimuli, which were presented for 6 to 14s. Moreover, similar transient suppressive and facilitative patterns were observed in the response period, which lasted for less than one second. Furthermore, we found that spontaneous eye blinking intervals fluctuated according to an 1/f scaling property, which is widely observed in various human movements. These results suggest that the dynamics of eye blinking under specific cognitive tasks exhibit a similar temporal structure at multiple time scales.
许多人类行为和运动在时间上的发生表现出自相似的时间模式。人类行走、手指敲击和心跳间隔的波动在多个时间尺度上具有统计学上的相似性。然而，眨眼这种独特的人类行为是否在其他类型的运动中嵌入了类似的时间结构，在很大程度上尚不清楚。在这项研究中，我们使用需要注意力的任务来评估眨眼在第二和亚秒时间尺度上的时间模式是如何改变的。我们的结果表明，眨眼活动随着任务难度水平的增加而受到更多抑制，并在暴露于听觉刺激后立即得到促进，听觉刺激持续 6 到 14 秒。此外，在不到一秒的反应时间内，也观察到了类似的短暂抑制和促进模式。此外，我们发现自发眨眼间隔根据 1/f 标度属性波动，这在各种人类运动中广泛观察到。这些结果表明，在特定认知任务下的眨眼动力学在多个时间尺度上表现出相似的时间结构。
