Transient heart rate acceleration in association with spontaneous eyeblinks

The reason why people spontaneously blink several times more frequently than is necessary for ocular lubrication has been a mystery. However, spontaneous eyeblinks selectively occur at attentional breakpoints of information processing, suggesting the involvement of spontaneous eyeblink in attentional disengagement from external stimuli. Physiological activity also changes considerably according to attention state. Heart rate decreases when attention is directed at stimuli, while it increases as attention is released. Therefore, we examined the temporal dynamics between spontaneous eyeblinks and instantaneous heart rate under natural circumstances. Our results showed that the heart rate momentarily increases after each spontaneous eyeblink while participants were freely viewing a movie or listening to a story. This phenomenon was consistently observed even when the participants were placed in a dark room. The skin conductance level on the fingers also increased after each spontaneous eyeblink, suggesting that the blink-related heart rate acceleration was induced by an increase in sympathetic nervous system activity. In contrast, no heart rate acceleration was observed to accompany spontaneous eyeblinks at rest or volitional eyeblinks. These results demonstrated that the generation of spontaneous eyeblinks and the activity of the autonomic nervous system are correlated under attentional influence of natural circumstances.