India, Sept. 24 -- Researchers have recently examined whether blinking frequency in young children is linked to the development of brain skills involved in flexible thinking and self-control.
The study, published in the journal Communications Psychology, included 113 children between 3 and 6 years old from two preschools in Japan. The group had almost equal numbers of boys and girls, with an average age of about 5.
Each child played a card-sorting game designed to test mental flexibility. For example, children were first asked to sort cards by color and then suddenly told to sort them by shape. They then had to switch between the two rules.
While the children played the game, researchers used a noninvasive brain-imaging method that uses ...