Abstract
Eye blinks provoke a loss of visual information. However, we are not constantly making conscious decisions about the appropriate moment to blink. The presence or absence of eye blinks also denotes levels of attention. We presented three movies with the exact same narrative but different styles of editing and recorded participants’ eye blinks. We found that moments of increased or decreased eye blinks by viewers coincided with the same content in the different movie styles. The moments of increased eye blinks corresponded to those when the actor leaves the scene and when the movie repeats the same action for a while. The moments of decreased eye blinks corresponded to actions where visual information was crucial to proper understanding of the scene presented. According to these results, viewers’ attention is more related to narrative content than to the style of editing when watching movies.
Highlights
While watching media content, there is something we do constantly that we hardly notice but that reflects our attention: blinking
We have to decide, whether consciously or not, the best moment to blink in order to lose the least possible amount of visual information
We found that synchronization between increased and decreased viewers’ eye blinks occurred at some specific moments of the timeline while they watched a movie, regardless of the style of editing of the movie but linked to its content. This agrees with the idea that, when watching media content, blinks are generated, in part, because of cognitive processing related to the narrative [23]
Summary
There is something we do constantly that we hardly notice but that reflects our attention: blinking. Humans blink between eight and 21 times per minute while resting [1], but our eye-blink rate changes when we carry out different activities such as talking, listening, looking around, or watching screens. Eye blinks have the primary physiological function of wetting the cornea [2,3]. They hide visual flow for a short (100–400 ms) period of time [4,5]. We have to decide, whether consciously or not, the best moment to blink in order to lose the least possible amount of visual information
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