Blinking while reading could serve as a way for your brain to take a quick break in the midst of processing the literary information. — Filepic
For a long time, it was thought that blinking only served to moisten the cornea and clean it of any dust or particles.
However, this reflex could have an influence on brain function and attention span, according to a Belgian study.
Over the past eight decades, several studies have suggested that spontaneous eye blinking not only fulfils biological functions, but also plays an important cognitive role.
University of Sheffield professor of medicine Dr Arthur Hall first put forward this idea in 1945, after observing the frequency of blinking in people reading aloud.
He noticed that these people blinked mainly when they came across spaces between words.
According to Prof Hall, this action could be linked to the need for a cognitive break while reading.
A team of researchers, led by Ghent University’s Assistant Professor Dr Louisa Bogaerts, has explored this hypothesis in a new study.
They used data from the Ghent Eye Tracking Corpus study, an experimental protocol where 15 volunteers were monitored as they silently read an Agatha Christie novel.
In four reading sessions, the researchers recorded a total of 30,367 eye blinks.
And these eye movements were far from random.
Assist Prof Bogaerts and colleagues found that participants were less likely to blink after reading frequently-occurring words in the text.
They did so much more after their gaze came to rest on more uncommon words.
“It is plausible that after encountering a lower-frequency word, participants were more often in need of a cognitive break, causing a post-effort effect,” the researchers explain in their paper, available on the prepublication website PsyArXiv.
Moreover, these moments of ocular respite coincided with natural cues in the text.
Blink rates increased by 4.9 times near punctuation marks, by 3.9 times at the end of a line, and by 6.1 times when the two were combined.
This indicates that blinks are strategically aligned with text structure, providing micro-breaks to allow the visual flow to better integrate information.
These findings reveal the unsuspected importance of an action as simple as blinking.
By synchronising these micro-breaks, our brain maximises its resources to better manage the influx of information it encounters.
So feel free to blink without moderation: it’s a reflex that’s good for us! – AFP Relaxnews