You can manage bookmarks using lists, please log in to your user account for this.
Media type:
E-Article
Title:
Humans quickly learn to blink strategically in response to environmental task demands
Contributor:
Hoppe, David;
Helfmann, Stefan;
Rothkopf, Constantin A.
Published:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018
Published in:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115 (2018) 9, Seite 2246-2251
Language:
English
DOI:
10.1073/pnas.1714220115
ISSN:
0027-8424;
1091-6490
Origination:
Footnote:
Description:
Significance Eye blinks serve the purpose of maintaining healthy vision but during a blink visual information processing is interrupted. While a multitude of medical, cognitive, and psychological factors have been shown to influence blinking, the present study establishes quantitatively how human blinking behavior is dynamically adapted to environmental task demands. In our experiment participants quickly learned to blink strategically. A minimal computational model captures the observed behavior as a trade-off between internal, physiological benefits and external, task-related costs given perceptual uncertainties. Crucially, the model allows predicting an individual subject’s temporal dynamics of blinking and provides an explanation of the long-known distribution of interblink intervals. Taken together, this provides a basis for future research using blinking as a behavioral marker.