ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Eye blinks as a visual processing stage.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 25 citations in OpenAlex.
- Blinks are strategically coupled with head movements in unconstrained natural gaze behavior.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Perceptual consequences of retinal stabilization with high-frequency non-stroboscopic displays.Journal of vision · 2026Article
- Quantum-Tunnelling Oscillators for Cognitive Modelling and Neural Computation: Foundations, Machine-Vision Realisation and Applications.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Retinal and extra-retinal contributions of blinking to perceptual alternation in bistable apparent motion.Journal of vision · 2026Article
- Perceptual consequences of retinal stabilization with high-frequency non-stroboscopic displays.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Multiunit and oscillatory activity in macaque V1 is modulated by blinking in a context-dependent way.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Eye blinks synchronize with musical beats during music listening.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Keeping your eye, head, and hand on the ball: Rapidly orchestrated visuomotor behavior in a continuous action task.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Encoding of blink information via wireless contact lens for eye-machine interaction.National science review · 2025Article
- Residual Foveal Motion Facilitates Processing of Visually Tracked Objects.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Seeing on the fly: No need for space-to-time encoding; saccade-generated transients enable fast, parallel representation of space.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Dataset combining EEG, eye-tracking, and high-speed video for ocular activity analysis across BCI paradigms.Scientific data · 2025Article
- The visual system does not operate like a camera.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Functional Vision Questionnaire Detects Near Triad Impairments in Adolescent Athletes With Concussion History.Journal of neuro-ophthalmology : the official journal of the North American Neuro-Ophthalmology Society · 2024Article
- Consequences of eye movements for spatial selectivity.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- 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
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Humans blink their eyes frequently during normal viewing, more often than it seems necessary for keeping the cornea well lubricated. Since the closure of the eyelid disrupts the image on the retina, eye blinks are commonly assumed to be detrimental to visual processing. However, blinks also provide luminance transients rich in spatial information to neural pathways highly sensitive to temporal changes. Here, we report that the luminance modulations from blinks enhance visual sensitivity. By coupling high-resolution eye tracking in human observers with modeling of blink transients and spectral analysis of visual input signals, we show that blinking increases the power of retinal stimulation and that this effect significantly enhances visibility despite the time lost in exposure to the external scene. We further show that, as predicted from the spectral content of input signals, this enhancement is selective for stimuli at low spatial frequencies and occurs irrespective of whether the luminance transients are actively generated or passively experienced. These findings indicate that, like eye movements, blinking acts as a computational component of a visual processing strategy that uses motor behavior to reformat spatial information into the temporal domain.
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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.