TY - INPR A1 - Brych, Mareike A1 - Händel, Barbara T1 - Disentangling top-down and bottom-up influences on blinks in the visual and auditory domain T2 - International Journal of Psychophysiology N2 - Sensory input as well as cognitive factors can drive the modulation of blinking. Our aim was to dissociate sensory driven bottom-up from cognitive top-down influences on blinking behavior and compare these influences between the auditory and the visual domain. Using an oddball paradigm, we found a significant pre-stimulus decrease in blink probability for visual input compared to auditory input. Sensory input further led to an early post-stimulus blink increase in both modalities if a task demanded attention to the input. Only visual input caused a pronounced early increase without a task. In case of a target or the omission of a stimulus (as compared to standard input), an additional late increase in blink rate was found in the auditory and visual domain. This suggests that blink modulation must be based on the interpretation of the input, but does not need any sensory input at all to occur. Our results show a complex modulation of blinking based on top-down factors such as prediction and attention in addition to sensory-based influences. The magnitude of the modulation is mainly influenced by general attentional demands, while the latency of this modulation allows to dissociate general from specific top-down influences that are independent of the sensory domain. KW - eye blinks KW - attention KW - auditory KW - visual KW - visual domain KW - auditory domain KW - oddball Y1 - 2020 UR - https://opus.bibliothek.uni-wuerzburg.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/24659 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-246590 SN - 1872-7697 SN - 0167-8760 N1 - accepted version ER -