ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Humans quickly learn to blink strategically in response to environmental task demands.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 77 citations in OpenAlex.
- Reliability and efficacy of maximum fluorescein tear break-up time in diagnosing dry eye disease.Scientific reports · 2021Trial
- Automatic neural mechanisms of social synchrony: pupil and Blink responses in adults with ADHD symptoms.Journal of neural transmission (Vienna, Austria : 1996) · 2026Article
- Blinks are strategically coupled with head movements in unconstrained natural gaze behavior.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Scene variability affects action decisions, confidence and behaviour dynamics.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Fixations, blinks, and pupils differentially capture individual and interpersonal dynamics in role-asymmetric mutual gaze interaction.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Dual-Electrodes PMUTs on Glasses for Wearable Human Blink Monitoring.Micromachines · 2026Article
- Dissociable Pupil and Oculomotor Markers of Attention Allocation and Distractor Suppression during Listening.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- The Role of Spontaneous Eye Blinks in Temporal Perception: An Eye Tracking Study.Journal of eye movement research · 2025Article
- Computational elements of natural vision.Journal of vision · 2025Review
- Keeping your eye, head, and hand on the ball: Rapidly orchestrated visuomotor behavior in a continuous action task.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Sleuthing subjectivity: a review of covert measures of consciousness.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Blinking indexes dynamic attending during and after music listening.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The timing of spontaneous eye blinks in text reading suggests cognitive role.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Blink and you see it.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Eye blinks as a visual processing stage.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Spontaneous blinking and brain health in aging: Large-scale evaluation of blink-related oscillations across the lifespan.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2024Article
- Neuronal correlates of eyeblinks are an expression of primary consciousness phenomena.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Article
- Blink rate and facial orientation reveal distinctive patterns of attentional engagement in autistic toddlers: a digital phenotyping approach.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Resolving visual motion through perceptual gaps.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Eye blinking is one of the most frequent human actions. The control of blinking is thought to reflect complex interactions between maintaining clear and healthy vision and influences tied to central dopaminergic functions including cognitive states, psychological factors, and medical conditions. The most imminent consequence of blinking is a temporary loss of vision. Minimizing this loss of information is a prominent explanation for changes in blink rates and temporarily suppressed blinks, but quantifying this loss is difficult, as environmental regularities are usually complex and unknown. Here we used a controlled detection experiment with parametrically generated event statistics to investigate human blinking control. Subjects were able to learn environmental regularities and adapted their blinking behavior strategically to better detect future events. Crucially, our design enabled us to develop a computational model that allows quantifying the consequence of blinking in terms of task performance. The model formalizes ideas from active perception by describing blinking in terms of optimal control in trading off intrinsic costs for blink suppression with task-related costs for missing an event under perceptual uncertainty. Remarkably, this model not only is sufficient to reproduce key characteristics of the observed blinking behavior such as blink suppression and blink compensation but also predicts without further assumptions the well-known and diverse distributions of time intervals between blinks, for which an explanation has long been elusive.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.