A psychophysiological study of visual functions of endogenous eyeblinks.

从信息处理或行为的角度来看，眨眼并不是一种有目的和自适应的视觉装置，因为眨眼通常每隔几秒就会带来一段昏厥期。然而，没有人指出它的视觉效率的缺点，因为它的信息和行为干扰眨眼。因此，本研究的目的是通过操作一些视觉变量来检验内源性眨眼的视觉功能。三个实验处理了光照和黑暗条件下眨眼活动差异的主要问题，得出的结论是光照条件不是决定眨眼频率的关键变量。三个实验均一致显示光条件的唯一倾向效应，说明光因子的影响相对较小。然而，眨眼波的形式在光照和黑暗条件下发生了显著变化。在暗室中，眨眼的EOG形式转变为较低但较长的波，这表明眨眼向缓慢而不完全的眨眼转变。另一个发现是，在许多情况下，眨眼是其他心理变量的指标，而不是视觉功能的指标。我们的印象是，眨眼作为心理负荷、任务难度和工作记忆的函数呈线性增加，特别是在获得外部视觉信息后的内部信息加工过程中。因此，我们得出结论，眨眼的视觉功能相对退化，眨眼作为内部操作的作用，如心理负荷、任务难度或工作记忆，特别是在不需要更多信息收集的情况下。

Eyeblinks are not a purposive and adaptive apparatus for vision from the view point of information processing or behavior, for eyeblinks bring usually about a black out period every few seconds. However, no one has been pointed out its disadvantages of visual efficiency because of its informational and behavioral disturbances by eyeblinks. So the purpose of the present study is to examine the visual function of endogenous eyeblinks by operating some visual variables.One conclusion drawn from three experiments which had dealt with the main issue of the differences of eyeblink activities between light and dark condition was that the light condition was not a critical variable which determine eyeblink rates. All of three experiments conducted demonstrated consistently the only tendency effect of light condition, which implicates the relatively low effect of light factor. However, the blink wave forms were dramatically changed from light to dark condition. The EOG form of eyeblinks in the dark chamber was changed to the lower but longer wave, which indicates to shift to the slow and incomplete blinks.One more finding is that in many cases blinks are the indices of the other psychological variables rather than the visual functions. It is our impression that eyeblinks are to increase linearly as a function of mental load, task difficulty and working memory especially during the internal processing of information after acquiring the outer visual information. So we concluded that the visual functions of eyeblinks are relatively degraded and the role of eyeblinks as internal operation as mental load, task difficulty, or working memory, especially in the situation where no more information collection is required.