A “BLINKING” clue might reveal if someone is really paying attention to what you’re saying or not.
That’s the latest from psychologists who say our blinking habits are linked to how hard we’re listening to someone.
Blinking is a human reflex, and typically happens without us having to think about it.
But scientists wanted to work out of blinking might also be linked to “filtering out background noise to focus on what someone is trying to say to us“.
And they found that people will naturally change their blinking habits when they’re working harder to understand speech in noisy environments.
Scientists said that it suggests that blinking “reflects the mental effort behind everyday listening“.
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And these patterns remain true even across different lighting conditions, whether it’s “bright, dim, or dark”.
“We wanted to know if blinking was impacted by environmental factors and how it related to executive function,” says lead author Pénélope Coupal, of Concordia University’s Laboratory for Hearing and Cognition.
“For instance, is there a strategic timing of a person’s blinks so they would not miss out on what is being said?”
And it turns out that there is a big difference.
Experiments showed that people will blink less when they’re trying to focus on speech.
“We don’t just blink randomly,” Coupal said.
“In fact, we blink systematically less when salient information is presented.”
To solve the blinking puzzle, researchers sat almost 50 adults in a soundproofed room.
They were asked to fixate on a cross on a screen, and had to listen short sentences place through headphones.
At the same time, background noise levels were varied from quiet to loud.
The participants were fitted with eye-tracking glasses so that the researchers could record every single blink, as well as its exact timing.
And then the trials were divided into three time windows of “before, during, and after each sentence”.
The study showed that blink rates would consistently drop when participants were listening to a sentence compared to the moments before and after.
And the blink suppression was “especially pronounced” when it was very noisy.
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A follow-up experiment also tested blinking rates in different lighting conditions and the same patterns emerged.
So researcher think that it’s the “cognitive demand” driving the phenomenon – and not the amount of light reaching the eye.
The amount that each person blinked would vary wildly.
Some people blinked as few as 10 times per minute, while others blinked 70 times a minute.
But the general trend was “visible and significant”.
“Our study suggests that blinking is associated with losing information, both visual and auditory,” said co-author Mickael Deroche, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology.
“That is presumably why we suppress blinking when important information is coming.
“But to be fully convincing, we need to map out the precise timing and pattern of how visual/auditory information is lost during a blink.”
This research was published in Trends in Hearing.
