Brych Mareike, Händel Barbara
Department of Psychology III, University of Wuerzburg, Germany.
Int J Psychophysiol. 2020 Dec;158:400-410. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2020.11.002. Epub 2020 Nov 9.
Sensory input as well as cognitive factors can drive the modulation of blinking. Our aim was to dissociate sensory driven bottom-up from cognitive top-down influences on blinking behavior and compare these influences between the auditory and the visual domain. Using an oddball paradigm, we found a significant pre-stimulus decrease in blink probability for visual input compared to auditory input. Sensory input further led to an early post-stimulus blink increase in both modalities if a task demanded attention to the input. Only visual input caused a pronounced early increase without a task. In case of a target or the omission of a stimulus (as compared to standard input), an additional late increase in blink rate was found in the auditory and visual domain. This suggests that blink modulation must be based on the interpretation of the input, but does not need any sensory input at all to occur. Our results show a complex modulation of blinking based on top-down factors such as prediction and attention in addition to sensory-based influences. The magnitude of the modulation is mainly influenced by general attentional demands, while the latency of this modulation allows dissociating general from specific top-down influences that are independent of the sensory domain.
感觉输入以及认知因素均可驱动眨眼的调节。我们的目的是区分感觉驱动的自下而上与认知自上而下对眨眼行为的影响，并比较听觉和视觉领域中的这些影响。使用奇偶数范式，我们发现与听觉输入相比，视觉输入在刺激前眨眼概率显著降低。如果任务要求关注输入，感觉输入在两种模式下都会导致刺激后早期眨眼增加。只有视觉输入在没有任务的情况下会导致明显的早期增加。在出现目标或遗漏刺激（与标准输入相比）的情况下，在听觉和视觉领域均发现眨眼率在后期额外增加。这表明眨眼调节必须基于对输入的解释，但根本不需要任何感觉输入即可发生。我们的结果表明，除了基于感觉的影响外，眨眼还基于自上而下的因素（如预测和注意力）进行复杂的调节。调节的幅度主要受一般注意力需求的影响，而这种调节的潜伏期允许区分与感觉领域无关的一般自上而下影响和特定自上而下影响。
