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An everyday action like blinking may offer a glimpse into how a young child's brain is developing. Researchers at University of Tsukuba and Kyoto University have found that young children who blink more frequently adapt better to changing rules. Furthermore, blink rate is associated with the neural origins of executive function development. The findings suggest that spontaneous eye-blink rate could serve as a valuable indicator for tracking the development of executive function in early childhood.

Tsukuba, Japan—Executive function encompasses a suite of cognitive processes that enable individuals to regulate their behavior, thoughts, and emotions. These skills are essential for tasks such as following instructions, controlling impulses, and adapting to changing situations. Early childhood is a critical period for the development of executive function, and differences in these abilities have been linked to future academic success, social competence, and long-term health and life outcomes. Consequently, understanding the neural mechanisms underlying executive function development is an important scientific goal. However, because many brain measurement techniques are either restrictive or invasive, researchers have had limited opportunities to investigate such neural mechanisms in young children.

To address this challenge, the research team examined spontaneous blinking, an everyday behavior that occurs largely outside conscious awareness. Previous studies indicate that spontaneous eye-blink rate, defined as the number of spontaneous blinks per minute, may be influenced by neuromodulatory systems, such as those involving dopamine signaling. While newborns blink only a few times per minute, blink rate increases significantly across infancy and early childhood, eventually approaching the typical adult average of 20 to 30 blinks per minute. This developmental change closely coincides with the period when executive function rapidly emerges and develops. During the same period, substantial individual differences in blink rate also begin to manifest.

In this study, the researchers used functional near-infrared spectroscopy, a noninvasive neuroimaging technique, to measure activity in the prefrontal cortex of 113 children aged 3-6 years. While the children were engaged in a cognitive flexibility task—a card-sorting game in which the rules changed partway through, for example from sorting by color to sorting by shape—the researchers simultaneously measured spontaneous eye-blink rate using video recordings. Children with higher spontaneous eye-blink rates performed better on the rule-switching task, an association that held even after controlling for age. Moreover, a higher eye-blink rate was specifically linked to activation in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region known to support cognitive flexibility, but not to the other prefrontal subregions measured. Older children tended to exhibit more focused activation in this region, suggesting that the developmental increase in spontaneous eye-blink rate is associated with greater specialization of task-relevant brain networks (a process known as "functional differentiation" of the prefrontal cortex).

Since spontaneous eye-blink rate can be readily assessed from ordinary video recordings without requiring specialized equipment, it holds promise as a simple, noninvasive indicator for tracking executive function and brain development.

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This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (Grant Numbers 23H04830, 24K20598, and 23KJ1169) (R.K.), JSPS KAKENHI (Grant Number 24K00486) (Y.M. and R.K.), and financial support from a crowdfunding project through the academic crowdfunding platform "academist" (Project No. 396) (K.O., N.Y., and R.K.).

Original Paper

Title of original paper:

Emergent blink rate in early childhood is associated with neural origins of executive function

Journal:

Communications Psychology

DOI:

10.1038/s44271-026-00524-6

Correspondence

Assistant Professor KUWAMIZU Ryuta
Advanced Research Initiative for Human High Performance (ARIHHP), Institute of Health and Sport Sciences, University of Tsukuba

Professor MORIGUCHI Yusuke
Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University

Related Link

Institute of Medicine
Advanced Research Initiative for Human High Performance (ARIHHP)