Blinking can give your brain a micro-break during cognitive tasks

Blinking serves a vital physiological function, removing debris from our eyes and keeping them lubricated. But now researchers have found that it can also have a cognitive role.

In 1945, Arthur Hall at the University of Sheffield in the UK reported on the frequency of blinking when people read aloud and found that it mostly coincided with gaps in the print. He suggested that blinking can help people pause while reading.

To expand on this idea, Louisa Bogaerts at Ghent University in Belgium and her colleagues analyzed data previously collected for the Ghent Eye Tracking Corpus study, in which 15 people were monitored while they silently read an Agatha Christie novel across four sessions and collectively blinked 30,367 times.

“The results clearly show that we don’t blink randomly when we read,” says Bogaerts.

The team found that participants were less likely to blink after reading words that occurred frequently in the text compared to those that occurred infrequently. “Increased blinking after fixation on lower frequency words suggests that cognitive effort influences blinking behavior,” says Bogaerts. Blinking can provide a “cognitive break,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

They also found that blink rates were 4.9 times higher at any punctuation mark on average compared to other positions in the text. They were also 3.9 times higher at the end of a line on a page and 6.1 times higher when punctuation marks and line endings coincided.

“Increased blinking at punctuation marks and line endings likely reflects that these are natural attentional breakpoints—we align with these breakpoints in the text and pause to blink,” says Bogaerts. “Together, these results support the hypothesis that blink timing during reading is not random, but strategically aligned with the cognitive demands posed by the text.”

“Blinking provides a brief pause in visual input to allow new information to be integrated,” says Paul Corballis of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. “I think it’s a long way off, but I might consider using online tracking of blinks and eye movements to monitor situational awareness of pilots or air traffic controllers or anyone who needs it. [re]watchful hand as you monitor and make sense of incoming data – perhaps including the ‘drivers’ of driverless cars.”