Neuronal activity was recorded in the cerebellar interpositus nucleus in infant rats during classical conditioning of the eye-blink response. The percentage and amplitude of eye-blink conditioned responses increased as a function of postnatal age. Learning-specific neuronal activity in the cerebellum emerged ontogenetically in parallel with the eye-blink conditioned response. There were also ag...

Physiological reactions to noxious stimuli are often used to make inferences about pain, but few studies have thoroughly examined the intra- and interindividual relationships between them. In the present study (N=104), multilevel analyses was used to assess relations between physiological (nociceptive flexion reflex magnitude [NFR], blink reflex magnitude, skin conductance response [SCR], heart...

Blinking of eye is a routine human activity which seldom attracts any attention of clinicians in health and disease. There is experimental evidence that blink rate is affected in extrapyramidal disorders affecting the balance of these neurotransmitters. However, no observations regarding blink rate in Wilson disease (WD) have been reported previously. We report a patient of WD with an increased...

A detailed study of the human blink reflex in the different parts of the orbicularis oculi muscle has been carried out. The first component of the blink reflex has been demonstrated in patients with Friedreich's ataxia, who have selective loss of large sensory fibres resulting in loss of proprioceptive input. It has been established that both components of the blink reflex are cutaneous reflexe...

The attentional blink refers to the transient impairment in perceiving the 2nd of two targets presented in close temporal proximity in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect on human attentional-blink performance of disrupting the function of the magnocellular pathway--a major visual-processing pathway specialized in temporal segreg...

Although spontaneous blinking is one of the most frequent human movements, little is known about its neural basis. We developed a rat model of spontaneous blinking to identify and better characterize the spontaneous blink generator. We monitored spontaneous blinking for 55 min periods in normal conditions and after the induction of mild dry eye or dopaminergic drug challenges. The normal sponta...

The effects of the sensory modality of the lead stimulus and of task difficulty on attentional modulation of the electrical and acoustic blink reflex were examined. Participants performed a discrimination and counting task with either two acoustic, two visual, or two tactile lead stimuli. In Experiment 1, facilitation of the electrically elicited blink was greater during task-relevant than duri...

A lot of people show a decline in performance when they have to report a second target stimulus in a stream of distractor stimuli. Curiously, this decline only happens when the second target appears approximately 200-500ms after the first target. Recently, Choi, Chang, Shibata, Sasaki, and Watanabe (2012) have shown that a short, one-hour training can eliminate this “attentional blink”. Up to n...

OBJECTIVE Electrophysiological recording of the electrically elicited blink reflex is the most reliable method of investigating habituation of the startle reflex. The purpose of this study was to compare the habituation and the late R3-component of the blink reflex between control subjects (N=19) and first-episode patients with schizophrenia (N=17), psychotic depression (N=23), and severe non-p...

When two targets are presented within 500 msec of each other in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), the accuracy of second target identification is significantly reduced; a phenomenon termed the attentional blink. Recent studies have reported that children and adults with dyslexia exhibit deficits tied to the attentional blink; however, some ambiguity remains as to the nature of these impa...