Blinking can give our brain a micro break to restore ideas. And even if we don’t think about it, we don’t blink our eyes randomly.
Em 1945, Arthur Hall, from the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, how often people blinked while reading aloud, finding that it mostly coincided with gaps in the print.
He then suggested that Blinking can help people take breaks while reading, explains to.
Louisa Bogaertsfrom Ghent University in Belgium, and his colleagues decided to test this idea. They analyzed data collected for a new one published in December and titled “Ghent Eye Tracking Corpus.”
During the experiment, 15 people were monitored while silently read an Agatha Christie novel over four sessions. In total, they blinked their eyes 30,367 times. But not in an arbitrary way.
“The results clearly show that we do not blink randomly while reading,” explains Bogaerts. This is because people blinked less after read words that occurred frequently in the text. But when they didn’t know a word, they blinked more.
“The increase in blinking after fixation on lower frequency words suggests that cognitive effort influences blinking behavior,” says Bogaerts. Blinking your eyes can provide a “cognitive pause”, the researchers concluded.
The study also recorded that the number of “eye blinks” were 4.9 times higher in any punctuation markon average, compared to other positions in the text. They were also 3.9 times louder at the end of a line on a page and 6.1 times louder when punctuation marks and line ends coincided.
“Increased blinking at punctuation marks and line endings likely reflects the fact that these are natural interruption points in attention — we align with these breakpoints in the text and we pause to blink,” says Bogaerts.
“Taken together, these findings support the hypothesis that blinking time during reading is not randombut strategically aligned with the cognitive demands posed by the text.”
“Blinking allows a momentary pause in visual input to allow the integration of new information”, agrees Paul Corballisprofessor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
“I think there’s still some time left, but I can imagine using online tracking of ‘blinks’ and eye movements to monitor the situational awareness of pilots or air traffic controllersor anyone who needs to remain vigilant while monitoring and making sense of incoming data — perhaps including the ‘drivers’ of driverless cars.”
