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How TV viewers choose when to blink
Research from Japan suggests that when watching TV, we have trained
ourselves to pick the moment we blink so as to miss a little as
possible. |
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The study, which is published
today in the Proceedings of the Royal
Society B, was carried out by five
researchers. They studied people as they
watched TV and listened to audiobooks to
discover whether we blink automatically
during scene breaks or whether we have a
mechanism for choosing when to blink.
The team studied 14 subjects while they
watched two silent video clips – one from
Mr Bean and another featuring
landscapes or tropical fish. The audiobook
clip was from Harry Potter and the
Philosopher’s Stone.
They were told in advance that their eye
movements would be measured but not that the
team was specifically studying blinking.
They were then shown each clip three times
with a 60 second interval in between each
and then asked to answer a questionnaire
about what they had seen.
The researchers found that
the blink rate was significantly lower when
the participants were watching Mr Bean
than during the rest period, and when people
did blink it did not coincide with scene
breaks. Instead, they said, "synchronised
blinks occurred during scenes that required
less attention, such as at the conclusion of
an action, during the absence of the main
character, during a long shot and during
repeated presentations of a similar scene."
There was no blink synchronisation between
the participants when they watched the
background video or listened to the story.
"The results suggest that
humans share a mechanism for controlling the
timing of blinks that searches for an
implicit timing that is appropriate to
minimise the chance of losing critical
information while viewing a stream of visual
events," the study concluded.
So did we blink more
before the TV was invented? |
