Eye-blink patterns reflect attention to continuous speech

Abstract

Eye blinks do not only serve to maintain the tear film of the eye but also seem to have a functional role in information processing. People tend to inhibit an eye blink when they expect relevant information to occur and blink more often when the information has been processed. Recent studies have shown that this relation also holds for auditory information processing. Yet so far, only artificial auditory stimuli like tones or controlled sentences were used. In the current study, we tested whether there is a temporal association between the pauses in a continuous speech stream and the listener’s eye blinks. To this end, we analyzed the eye blinks of 35 participants who were instructed to attended to one of two simultaneously presented audio books. We found that the blink patterns of 13 participants were coupled with the speech pauses in the attended speech stream. These participants blinked more often during the pauses in the attended speech stream. Contrary to our prediction, participants did not inhibit their blinking preceding a pause in the attended speech stream. As expected, there was no evidence that the listeners’ blink pattern was coupled to the pauses in the ignored speech stream. Thus, we conclude that the listeners’ blink patterns can reflect attention to continuous speech.

Eye movements track prioritized auditory features in selective attention to natural speech

“…In a mixture of spatially distributed speakers (i.e. “cocktail party scenario”), orienting the eyes towards the target source seems to increase intelligibility (Best et al, 2020), and eye blinks are more likely to occur during pauses in target speech compared to distractor speech (Holtze et al, 2022). In addition, Jin and colleagues (2018) showed that blink related eye activity aligned with higher-order syntactic structures of temporally predictable, artificial speech (i.e.…”