Attentional Modulation of Eye Blinking Is Altered by Sex, Age, and Task Structure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spontaneous eye blinking is gaining popularity as a proxy for higher cognitive functions, as it is readily modulated by both environmental demands and internal processes. Prior studies were impoverished in sample size, sex representation, and age distribution, making it difficult to establish a complete picture of the behavior. Here we present eye-tracking data from a large cohort of normative participants ( n = 604; 393 F; aged 5–93 years) performing two tasks: one with structured, discrete trials (interleaved pro-/anti-saccade task, IPAST) and one with a less structured, continuous organization in which participants watch movies (free-viewing; FV). Sex- and age-based analyses revealed that females had higher blink rates between the ages of 22 and 58 years in the IPAST and 22 and 34 years in FV. We derived a continuous measure of blink probability to reveal behavioral changes driven by stimulus appearance in both paradigms. In the IPAST, blinks were suppressed near stimulus appearance, particularly on correct anti-saccade trials, which we attribute to the stronger inhibitory control required for anti-saccades compared with pro-saccades. In FV, blink suppression occurred immediately after scene changes, and the effect was sustained on scenes where gaze clustered among participants (indicating engagement of attention). Females were more likely than males to blink during appearance of novel stimuli in both tasks, but only within the age bin of 18–44 years. The consistency of blink patterns in each paradigm endorses blinking as a sensitive index for changes in visual processing and attention, while sex and age differences drive interindividual variability.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".