Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Spontaneous blinking of the eyes is important for lubrication of the cornea. However, it tends to occur at a higher rate than necessary for this purpose alone, suggesting that additional cognitive, social, or environmental factors may be involved. In particular, it has been shown that blinks occur at implicit breakpoints in a task and are sensitive to internal mental states related to attention and cognitive demand. Blinks also have a distinct social component due to the essential role that eye contact plays in nonverbal communication. Here, I am using video-based eye tracking to study blink behaviour in participants performing structured and unstructured tasks. Using data collected from over 500 healthy individuals, I aim to understand the timing of blinks in different task types and compare between them. Despite the high variability between subjects, I expect there to be consistent patterns of behaviour that are modulated by age, sex, and gender. By identifying the fundamental task-independent factors affecting blinking, this study fills a crucial gap in current knowledge of the neural mechanisms behind this behaviour. The Munoz labs control database is poised to reveal important relationships between blink timing and task features such as goal-oriented eye movements, luminance changes, and social stimuli. I also have access to patient data from an extensive network of clinical collaborators which I will use to study how neurological deficits may translate into specific abnormalities in blink behaviour. These findings will support the discovery of noninvasive disease biomarkers that use oculomotor behaviour as a proxy for cognition, memory, and motor ability, which is relevant to early disease phenotypes.