乳幼児から青年期までの内因性瞬目活動の年齢差と性差

抄録

Few systematic studies on the developmental change of eye blinks have been conducted, and the results of the research are somewhat inconsistent. Therefore, we have investigated the age and gender differences of children's endogenous eye blinks, by using a larger number of participants (801 participants ranging from 3-month to 16-year olds), delivering the same task to all age groups excluding 3-month babies to 3 year old children, and analyzing also other blink attributes such as closing, reopening and total blink duration. The results showed: (a) blink rates of the 3-month babies were 2–3 blinks per minute (bpm) and increased gradually to the peak blink rate for 9 year old children (23.9 bpm) whose rate was approximately the same as those of adults, (b) no gender difference was obtained throughout all age groups and (c) almost the same developmental curves of blink duration as that of blink rate was found in all age groups except in 1 and 3 year old children, whose durations were the shortest in all age groups.