Department of Psychology, University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli", Caserta, Italy.
Istituti Clinici Scientifici Maugeri IRCCS, SB S.p.A., Laboratorio di Valutazione Multimodale dei Disordini della Coscienza, Telese Terme BN, Italy.
Neurosci Lett. 2020 Sep 25;736:135293. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2020.135293. Epub 2020 Aug 6.
Previous evidence suggests that changes in spontaneous eye blink rate (EBR) in human adults might reflect the amount of attentional demand (i.e. cognitive load) during cognitive tasks. However, the actual direction of this relation is uncertain, since most studies investigated the role of cognitive load on EBR by employing visual tasks only. Here we aimed at elucidating the relationship between EBR and cognitive load in non-visual tasks. Sixteen healthy participants performed two auditory oddball tasks, i.e. passive listening to auditory tones versus active counting of target tones; each oddball task was immediately followed by a rest phase. Throughout the oddball tasks we assessed EBR and recorded the P300 on ERPs as an electrophysiological measure of attention. The results showed that participants' EBR increased during the active task compared to the respective rest phase. Amplitude and latency of the P300 too differed between passive and active tasks, but changes in EBR and P300 features were not correlated with each other. Our findings demonstrated that an increase in cognitive load is associated with an increase in EBR in cognitive tasks not involving visual attention. These findings are consistent with previous evidence suggesting shared neurobiological bases between attention and EBR.
先前的证据表明，成年人的自发性眨眼率（EBR）的变化可能反映了认知任务期间注意力需求的程度（即认知负荷）。然而，这种关系的实际方向并不确定，因为大多数研究仅通过视觉任务来研究认知负荷对 EBR 的作用。在这里，我们旨在阐明非视觉任务中 EBR 和认知负荷之间的关系。16 名健康参与者进行了两项听觉Oddball 任务，即被动聆听听觉音调和主动计数目标音；每项 Oddball 任务后立即进入休息阶段。在整个 Oddball 任务中，我们评估了 EBR 并记录了 ERPs 中的 P300，作为注意力的电生理测量。结果表明，与各自的休息阶段相比，参与者在主动任务期间 EBR 增加。P300 的幅度和潜伏期在被动和主动任务之间也有所不同，但 EBR 和 P300 特征的变化彼此之间没有相关性。我们的发现表明，在不涉及视觉注意力的认知任务中，认知负荷的增加与 EBR 的增加有关。这些发现与先前的证据一致，即注意力和 EBR 之间存在共同的神经生物学基础。
