ArticlePloS one2018
Eye blinks are perceived as communicative signals in human face-to-face interaction.
Article in PloS one, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 89 citations in OpenAlex.
- Dynamic facial movements shape how confident speakers appear.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2026Article
- Automatic neural mechanisms of social synchrony: pupil and Blink responses in adults with ADHD symptoms.Journal of neural transmission (Vienna, Austria : 1996) · 2026Article
- Will I speak louder if I see you struggling to understand? Speech modifications in response to non-verbal visual cues of listening effort.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- The modulating role of memory load on language switching in sentence comprehension: evidence from eye movements.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Influence of Stimulus Layout and Social Presence on Deception-Related Eye Movements and Blinks in the Concealed Information Test.Journal of eye movement research · 2026Article
- Fixations, blinks, and pupils differentially capture individual and interpersonal dynamics in role-asymmetric mutual gaze interaction.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Virtual agents as a scalable tool for diverse, robust gesture recognition.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Language-Invariant Strategies of Navigating Transitions in Joint Activities: Forms and Functions of Coordination Markers.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Transforming language research from classic desktops to virtual environments.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Understanding discourse in face-to-face settings: The impact of multimodal cues and listening conditions.Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2025Article
- Eyebrow movements as signals of communicative problems in human face-to-face interaction.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- If you blink at me, I'll blink back. Domestic dogs' feedback to conspecific visual cues.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
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- Conversational facial signals combine into compositional meanings that change the interpretation of speaker intentions.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The semantics of gaze in person perception: a novel qualitative-quantitative approach.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The other person's smiling amount affects one's smiling response during face-to-face conversations.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Gesture, spatial cognition and the evolution of language.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- The multimodal facilitation effect in human communication.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Article
- Article
- Communication for collaborative computation: two major transitions in human evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In face-to-face communication, recurring intervals of mutual gaze allow listeners to provide speakers with visual feedback (e.g. nodding). Here, we investigate the potential feedback function of one of the subtlest of human movements-eye blinking. While blinking tends to be subliminal, the significance of mutual gaze in human interaction raises the question whether the interruption of mutual gaze through blinking may also be communicative. To answer this question, we developed a novel, virtual reality-based experimental paradigm, which enabled us to selectively manipulate blinking in a virtual listener, creating small differences in blink duration resulting in 'short' (208 ms) and 'long' (607 ms) blinks. We found that speakers unconsciously took into account the subtle differences in listeners' blink duration, producing substantially shorter answers in response to long listener blinks. Our findings suggest that, in addition to physiological, perceptual and cognitive functions, listener blinks are also perceived as communicative signals, directly influencing speakers' communicative behavior in face-to-face communication. More generally, these findings may be interpreted as shedding new light on the evolutionary origins of mental-state signaling, which is a crucial ingredient for achieving mutual understanding in everyday social interaction.
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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.