期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2011
卷号：108
期号：52
页码：21270-21275
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1109304108
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Spontaneous eye blinking serves a critical physiological function, but it also interrupts incoming visual information. This tradeoff suggests that the inhibition of eye blinks might constitute an adaptive reaction to minimize the loss of visual information, particularly information that a viewer perceives to be important. To test this hypothesis, we examined whether the timing of blink inhibition, during natural viewing, is modulated between as well as within tasks, and also whether the timing of blink inhibition varies as a function of viewer engagement and stimulus event type. While viewing video scenes, we measured the timing of blinks and blink inhibition, as well as visual scanning, in a group of typical two-year-olds, and in a group of two-year-olds known for attenuated reactivity to affective stimuli: toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Although both groups dynamically adjusted the timing of their blink inhibition at levels greater than expected by chance, they inhibited their blinking and shifted visual fixation differentially with respect to salient onscreen events. Moreover, typical toddlers inhibited their blinking earlier than toddlers with ASD, indicating active anticipation of the unfolding of those events. These findings indicate that measures of blink inhibition can serve as temporally precise markers of perceived stimulus salience and are useful quantifiers of atypical processing of social affective signals in toddlers with ASD.
关键词：autonomic function ; child development ; eye-tracking ; social engagement
