The rate of blinking is related to certain mental activities. One common feature of states associated with low blink rates is the presence of concentrated cognitive activity. The purpose of the present study was to determine how blinking is affected by variations in mental load; it was hypothesized that, for a given nonvisual task, blinking would decrease as mental load increased. The first study reported here manipulated memory load by requiring Ss to retain a sequence of 4, 6, or 8 digits. The second study involved mental arithmetic under time pressure; half the trials contained zeros in the sequence of numbers to be summed. In both studies the rate of blinking was low when mental load was high and the rate was high when mental load was low. It is speculated that blinking may disrupt certain cognitive processes and may therefore be inhibited when these processes are active. When mental load is increased, the inhibition of blinking may be an adaptive mechanism which protects vulnerable cognitive processes from interference.
Blinking is related to certain cognitive processes. For example, individuals “punctuate” their speech by blinking between phrases and at the end of sentences. Daydreaming is associated with low rates of blinking. Blinking occurs between fixations and may be timed so as not to interfere with significant visual input. Apparently, blinking occurs at transitions between internal events and is inhibited at other times. In the experiment reported here, blinking was measured while the activity of operational memory was manipulated with mental load kept constant. The rate of blinking was significantly reduced when the cognitive operation of internal counting was being performed. It is inferred that the blink rate is low when information in memory is being operated on. To suspend blinking during certain cognitive activities would be adaptive if blinking disrupts them. Since the blackout period of the blink produces a rapid change in visual level, blinking disrupts those cognitive processes utilizing display areas accessible to visual input. Operational memory and the visual imagination may share components with the visual perceptual system. To protect these vulnerable processes from interference, blinking may be inhibited when they are active.
Thirty treatment-resistant patients with a primary DSA-IV diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder were assessed at admission to and discharge from a partial hospitalization program to determine whether improvement in symptoms of the disorder was associated with improvements in patients' quality of life. Symptom severity was measured using the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (YBOCS). Quality of life was measured using Lehman's Quality of Life (QOL) scale, which includes several objective and subjective indexes. YBOCS scores significantly improved with treatment, as did scores on the majority of the QOL subjective indexes and on the objective social, health, and activity indexes. No significant association between changes in YBOCS scores and QOL scores was found.
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