A new study published in Communications Psychology found that spontaneous eye-blink rate was associated with cognitive flexibility in young children. Researchers studied 113 children aged 35–80 months and found that children with higher blink rates performed better on a task requiring them to switch between changing rules. The study also linked higher blink rates with activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in cognitive control and flexible thinking. Nature
Introduction
An everyday action as simple as blinking may provide researchers with a new window into how young children’s brains develop.
A study published on September 15, 2026, in Communications Psychology has found an association between spontaneous eye-blink rate and the development of executive function in early childhood. Researchers from Kyoto University, the University of Tsukuba and Osaka University studied 113 children between 35 and 80 months old, roughly 3 to 6 years of age. Nature
The children completed a cognitive flexibility task in which they had to change the rule they were using to sort objects. At the same time, researchers recorded their spontaneous blinking and monitored activity in the prefrontal cortex using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, or fNIRS.
The key finding was an association: children who blinked more frequently tended to perform better when switching between rules, even after researchers accounted for age. Higher blink rates were also associated with greater activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during the task. Nature
The researchers stress that the findings do not mean parents can assess a child’s cognitive ability simply by counting how often the child blinks. Instead, the study suggests that spontaneous blinking could become a useful research measure for studying the development of executive function.
What Happened?
The research team wanted to investigate how executive function develops during early childhood and whether spontaneous eye-blink rate could provide information about that process.
Executive function refers to a group of mental abilities that help people control their behavior, manage information and adapt when circumstances change.
One important component is cognitive flexibility — the ability to change strategies or rules when the situation requires it.
This skill develops rapidly during early childhood.
The researchers recruited children from preschools in Osaka and Kyoto, Japan. The final study included 113 children, comprising 55 girls and 58 boys, with an average age of approximately 59 months. Nature
During the experiment, the children performed a version of the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) task.
In simple terms, children first sort cards according to one characteristic, such as color. Later, the rule changes and they have to sort the cards according to another characteristic, such as shape.
Successfully changing from the old rule to the new one requires cognitive flexibility.
While the children performed the task, researchers recorded their spontaneous eye blinks and measured prefrontal brain activity.
Key Details
The study produced several important findings:
- 113 children between 35 and 80 months participated in the final analysis.
- The children were recruited from two preschools in Osaka and Kyoto, Japan.
- Researchers measured spontaneous eye-blink rate while children performed a cognitive flexibility task.
- Older children generally performed better at switching between rules.
- Older children also tended to have higher spontaneous blink rates.
- Higher spontaneous blink rates were associated with better switching accuracy.
- The association between blink rate and switching performance remained statistically significant after accounting for age.
- Higher blink rates were associated specifically with activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
- The study used fNIRS, a noninvasive technique for measuring changes in blood oxygenation associated with brain activity.
- The researchers concluded that spontaneous eye-blink rate may provide a useful physiological indicator for studying executive-function development. Nature
How Did Researchers Measure Cognitive Flexibility?
The researchers used the Dimensional Change Card Sort, a widely used developmental task for examining cognitive flexibility in young children.
The task involves changing the sorting rule during the experiment.
For example, a child might initially be asked to sort cards according to color. After the rule changes, the child may need to sort the same type of cards according to shape.
This can be challenging for younger children because they must stop relying on the previous rule and apply the new one.
The study found that switching accuracy increased substantially with age. The statistical analysis reported a strong positive association between age and switching accuracy. Nature
The researchers then examined whether blink rate was related to this performance.
They found that higher spontaneous blink rates were positively correlated with switching accuracy.
Importantly, the association remained present even after accounting for the children’s age, although it became smaller.
That distinction matters because blink rate itself changes considerably during childhood.
What Is Cognitive Flexibility?
Cognitive flexibility is the ability to adjust thinking or behavior when circumstances change.
For a young child, it can appear in relatively simple situations.
A child may need to:
- Stop using one rule and learn another.
- Change the way they approach a puzzle.
- Move from one activity to another.
- Adapt when a familiar routine changes.
- Consider a different way to solve a problem.
- Switch attention between different tasks.
These abilities are part of the broader category known as executive function.
Executive function develops throughout childhood rather than appearing all at once.
The new study is particularly relevant because the researchers examined children during a period when these abilities are developing rapidly. Nature
What Did the Study Find About Blinking?
The researchers found that spontaneous eye-blink rate increased with age among the children studied.
They also found substantial individual differences in blink rate as children became older.
Most importantly, children with higher spontaneous blink rates tended to achieve higher scores on the rule-switching task.
The reported correlation between spontaneous blink rate and switching accuracy was rho = 0.35, with statistical significance below 0.001.
After controlling for age, the association remained statistically significant, although weaker, at rho = 0.22.
This means that the relationship could not simply be explained by the fact that older children both blink more and perform better.
However, it is important to interpret the result correctly.
The researchers found an association, not proof that blinking causes better cognitive flexibility.
The Brain Connection
The study went beyond measuring behavior.
Researchers used functional near-infrared spectroscopy, or fNIRS, to examine activity in parts of the prefrontal cortex while the children completed the task.
The prefrontal cortex plays an important role in higher-order cognitive processes.
The researchers found that cognitive flexibility-related activity was particularly associated with the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or right DLPFC.
Higher spontaneous eye-blink rates were also associated with activity in this region.
The finding provides a potential connection between three measurements:
Blinking → prefrontal brain activity → cognitive flexibility
But this should not be interpreted as a simple cause-and-effect chain.
The study was observational and correlational in its key relationships. It demonstrates that these measures are related in the children studied, not that increasing blink frequency would improve brain development or cognitive flexibility.
Why Does the Right Prefrontal Cortex Matter?
The prefrontal cortex is involved in several aspects of executive control.
The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is particularly relevant to tasks involving maintaining information, controlling behavior and adapting to changing rules.
In the new study, older children showed greater functional differentiation toward the right and dorsal portions of the prefrontal cortex during the cognitive flexibility task.
The findings suggest that the organization of prefrontal activity changes as children develop.
That is important because researchers have long known that executive functions improve substantially during childhood, but measuring the underlying neural development in young children can be difficult.
A simple physiological signal such as spontaneous blinking could potentially provide another way to investigate that development.
What Did the Researchers Say?
The research team concluded that the emergence of spontaneous eye-blink rate in early childhood is associated with the development of executive function and its prefrontal neural mechanisms.
Researchers from the University of Tsukuba described the finding as evidence that an everyday behavior such as blinking could offer a window into executive-function development.
The university’s research announcement also emphasized that the study found higher blink rates associated with better performance when children had to adapt to changing rules. Tsukuba University
The research was led by Ryuta Kuwamizu, with collaborators including Nozomi Yamamoto, Kota Otani and Yusuke Moriguchi. The paper was published in Communications Psychology, part of the Nature Portfolio.
Background: Why Do Humans Blink?
Blinking is essential for maintaining healthy eyes.
Every blink helps spread the tear film across the eye’s surface.
But spontaneous blinking also varies depending on a person’s state, activity and environment.
Previous research has investigated spontaneous eye-blink rate as a physiological signal potentially related to neuromodulatory systems, including dopamine-related processes.
The new study builds on that broader scientific background.
Researchers were interested in whether changes in spontaneous blink rate during early childhood might correspond with changes in higher-order cognitive development.
The timing is particularly interesting.
Newborns blink only a few times per minute, while blink rates increase substantially during infancy and childhood and eventually approach typical adult levels of roughly 20–30 blinks per minute.
The researchers observed that blink rates were particularly low and showed relatively little variation among the youngest children in their sample, while individual differences became more pronounced at older ages.
What Makes This Study Different?
Previous research has already explored connections between blinking, cognitive control and neurological processes.
What makes this study notable is its focus on early childhood development and its combination of behavioral and brain measurements.
The researchers did not simply count how often children blinked.
They simultaneously examined:
- Spontaneous eye-blink rate
- Cognitive flexibility
- Prefrontal brain activity
- Age-related developmental changes
This allowed the researchers to examine whether the behavioral association had a corresponding neural pattern.
The result was an association between higher blink rates, better switching performance and greater activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
What the Study Does Not Prove
The findings are interesting, but they should not be overstated.
The research does not show that a child who blinks more is necessarily smarter.
It also does not establish that increasing a child’s blink rate would improve cognitive flexibility.
Parents should therefore not attempt to use blink counting as a home test of intelligence, attention or brain development.
The study examined a specific group of children completing a controlled laboratory task.
Blinking can also be affected by many other factors, including visual activity, environmental conditions and internal state.
The researchers themselves describe eye-blink rate as a potential indicator for future developmental research rather than a clinical diagnostic test.
Study Strengths and Limitations
The study included 113 children, and the researchers conducted an a priori power analysis indicating that 82 participants would be needed to detect the anticipated medium-sized correlation with 80% statistical power. The final sample therefore exceeded that target.
The researchers also performed additional analyses adjusting for sex and testing location and checked whether influential outliers changed the conclusions. They reported that the main conclusions remained unchanged.
However, there are limitations.
The children came from two preschools in Osaka and Kyoto, so the findings cannot automatically be generalized to every child or population.
The study also did not collect socioeconomic-status, community-of-descent or race/ethnicity data.
The research was also not formally preregistered, although the paper states that the primary analyses were confirmatory tests of planned hypotheses and that exploratory analyses were separately reported.
These limitations do not invalidate the findings, but they are important when considering what the study can and cannot tell us.
Why This Matters
The biggest significance of the research is methodological.
Studying brain development in very young children can be challenging.
Children cannot always remain still for long periods, follow complex instructions or tolerate sophisticated measurement equipment.
The researchers therefore looked at an extremely simple physiological behavior that occurs naturally.
If future studies confirm the relationship, spontaneous eye-blink rate could potentially become another tool for investigating how executive function develops.
That could be useful for developmental neuroscience because researchers need measurements that are practical, noninvasive and relatively easy to collect.
However, much more research would be needed before blink rate could be considered a reliable developmental marker for individual children.
What Happens Next?
The next step is replication.
The findings need to be examined in larger and more diverse groups of children and across different settings.
Researchers could also investigate whether the association remains stable over longer periods and whether changes in blink rate correspond with changes in executive-function performance within the same children.
The current research provides an important starting point, but it does not establish a clinical application.
The study’s underlying data and statistical analysis code have been made available through an Open Science Framework repository, allowing other researchers to examine and reproduce the analyses.
Future research could therefore help determine whether spontaneous blink rate is merely correlated with executive-function development or whether it can provide a reliable physiological measure of specific developmental processes.
What Parents Should Take Away
For parents, the most important message is simple: don’t use blinking as a test of your child’s cognitive ability.
The study does not provide a recommended blink rate for children, nor does it suggest that parents should monitor ordinary blinking.
Instead, the research offers scientists a new clue about how children’s brains and behavior develop together.
Cognitive flexibility is something children naturally develop through everyday experiences, play, learning and interaction.
Activities that ask children to change rules, solve problems in different ways or adapt to new situations can naturally involve the same kind of flexible thinking examined by researchers.
The new study does not test whether particular educational activities improve blink rate or brain development, so such conclusions would require separate evidence.
Conclusion
A new study involving 113 young children has found a significant association between spontaneous eye-blink rate and cognitive flexibility.
Children with higher spontaneous blink rates tended to perform better when asked to switch between changing rules. The relationship remained after researchers accounted for age, suggesting that the finding cannot be explained simply by older children both blinking more and performing better.
The researchers also found that blink rate was associated with activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, providing a possible neural connection between blinking and the development of executive function.
The discovery does not mean that blinking measures intelligence or that parents should monitor how often their children blink.
Instead, it offers researchers a potentially useful, noninvasive way to investigate the developing brain.
As scientists continue to study executive function during the preschool years, an ordinary action that most people barely notice could provide another small clue about how children’s ability to adapt, switch rules and think flexibly develops.
FAQs
1. What did the new study about children’s blink rates find?
The study found that higher spontaneous eye-blink rates were associated with better performance on a cognitive flexibility task among children aged 35–80 months. The association remained after accounting for age.
2. How many children participated in the study?
The final study included 113 children, aged between 35 and 80 months. They were recruited from two preschools in Osaka and Kyoto, Japan.
3. What is cognitive flexibility?
Cognitive flexibility is the ability to adjust thinking or behavior when rules, circumstances or demands change. In the study, it was measured through a card-sorting task that required children to switch between different sorting rules.
4. Does blinking more mean a child is smarter?
No. The study found an association between blink rate and performance on a particular cognitive flexibility task. It does not establish that children who blink more are generally more intelligent or that blinking causes better cognitive performance.
5. Which part of the brain was associated with children’s blink rate?
Higher spontaneous eye-blink rates were associated with activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area involved in executive-function processes.
6. How did researchers measure brain activity?
The researchers used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a noninvasive technique that measures changes associated with brain activity.
7. Can parents use blink rate to assess a child’s development?
No. The study does not establish eye-blink rate as a diagnostic or home assessment tool. More research is needed to determine whether it can become a reliable developmental indicator.
8. Where was the research published?
The research was published on September 15, 2026, in Communications Psychology, a Nature Portfolio journal. The paper is titled “Emergent blink rate in early childhood is associated with neural origins of executive function.”
