A psychological research on the relationship between selective attention and spontaneous blinking

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As the proverb saying that the eye is the window of the mind, people attend to other's eye in the face-to-face situation. Many studies have explained the relationship between the eye behavior and psychological processes. In this research, we noticed the spontaneous eye blink activity in the eye behavior because eye blinks occur in order to not only protect the eye from external stimuli but also to be related to metal information processing (Tada, Yamada, & Fukuda, 1991). We have studied the eye blink activity during cognitive processing tasks using a method of temporal distribution of blinks (TDBs) analyzed by an automatic video based blink analysis system (Matsuo & Fukuda, 1996). The results have shown that spontaneous eye blinks was inhibited during processing stimuli and facilitated at the termination of processing and that the TDBs shaped the blink rate trough and peak.The purpose of this investigation was to demonstrate the changes in eye blinks during selective attention tasks using a dual modality attention task in which one modality is attended and the other is not attended in the presentation of visual and auditory stimuli. In experiment 1 and 2, the blink rate did not peak after auditory stimuli in no task, although the blink rate peaked after visual stimuli in no task. In experiment 3, the occurrence of blink was inhibited after the selective attended auditory stimuli embedded in no task auditory stimuli. In experiment 4, blinks occurred continuously after the blink rate peak after the selective attended visual stimuli embedded in no task visual stimuli. In experiment 5, the blink rate did not peak after non-attended spatial stimuli. These results suggested that changes in eye blinks could be related to selective attention and that eye blinks could provide an additional index for the detection of deception or the attention during driving automobile.