(70) Synchronization between eye blinking and task structure during an auditory attention task
Date:
Contributors: Huber, S. E. , Martini, M., Sachse, P.
Venue: 32nd International Congress of Psychology (ICP), Prague, Czech Republic, July 18-23, 2021 (online)
Abstract: Eye blinking is one of the most abundant and persistent human behaviors throughout the daytime. A comprehensive body of knowledge suggests that blinking is a highly interactively regulated motor process, affected by various environmental and endogenous factors. Among the diverse findings precipitated in the literature is the repeated identification of close temporal associations between the patterns of blinks interwoven in time and structural characteristics of laboratory tasks or activities. While the minimization of visual information loss during blinking may explain why blinks are more probable to occur when relevant external cues are not to be expected during a visual attention task, they can hardly do so for tasks in which task relevant cues are merely presented along the auditory perception modality. However, temporal associations between eye blinking and task structure persist also in this case. We argue that this is due to an inherent correspondence between attention and the temporal, organismic organization of blinking. In particular, we hypothesize that attention adjusted dynamically to specific, situational requirements regulates the timing of blinking and thereby causes synchronization between external task characteristics and temporal blink patterns. Using eye-tracking to monitor eye blinking of 55 participants during a laboratory, auditory attention task, we test several of the implications of this hypothesis experimentally. We find that (i) blink patterns are dynamically modulated by purely auditory input signals at a fundamental perceptional level, and that the magnitude of the effect is modulated by both (ii) the valence and (iii) the predictability of the auditory signals. This synchronization between behavioral and external signals suggests eye blink as a readily available, non-invasive behavioral marker for context-sensitive, dynamic allocation of attention.