Abstract

Eye blinking is an essential maintenance behaviour for many terrestrial animals, but is also a risky behaviour as the animal is unable to scan the environment and detect hazards while its eyes are temporarily closed. It is therefore likely that the length of time that the eyes are closed and the length of the gap between blinks for a species may reflect aspects of the ecology of that species, such as its social or physical environment. An earlier published study conducted a comparative study linking blinking behaviour and ecology, and detailed a dataset describing the blinking behaviour of a large number of primate species that was collected from captive animals, but the analysis presented did not control for the nonindependence of the data due to common evolutionary history. In the present study, the dataset is reanalysed using phylogenetic comparative methods, after reconsideration of the parameters describing the physical and social environments of the species. I find that blink rate is best described by the locomotion mode of a species, where species moving through arboreal environments blink least, ground-living species blink most, and species that use both environments show intermediate rates. The duration of a blink was also related to locomotion mode, and positively correlated with both mean species group size and mean species body mass, although the increase in relation to group size is small. How a species moves through the environment therefore appears to be important for determining blinking behaviour, and suggests that complex arboreal environments may require less interruption to visual attention. Given that the data were collected with captive individuals, caution is recommended for interpreting the correlations found.

Highlights

  • Eye blinking, where both eyes are temporarily closed by movements of the eyelids, is a behaviour that is performed continuously and frequently by humans and other animals (Blount, 1927; Walls, 1942)

  • The analysis presented here suggests that both blink rate and blink duration are related to locomotion mode in primates

  • Blink rate is lowest in arboreal species, and higher in species that spend some of the time moving on the ground, while blink duration is shortest in species that switch between the ground and arboreal habitats, and longer in those that spend their lives either moving solely on the ground or solely in the trees

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Summary

Introduction

Eye blinking, where both eyes are temporarily closed by movements of the eyelids, is a behaviour that is performed continuously and frequently by humans and other animals (Blount, 1927; Walls, 1942). Spontaneous eye blinks cause the individual to momentarily lose visual information, but in humans this ‘blackout’ (where the eyes are closed and it is not possible to collect visual information) is not perceived by the individual due to an attentional suppression mechanism (Volkmann, Riggs & Moore, 1980; Riggs, Volkmann & Moore, 1981), with a suppression of activity in both the visual cortex and other areas of the brain that are involved with awareness of changes in the environment (Bristow et al, 2005)

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