Blinking your eyes helps moisten them, but that’s not all. According to a recent study, this mechanical action also plays an essential role in the processing of visual information.
Our eyeseyes are never truly at rest. During normal vision, humans blink often: up to 20 times per minute on average (or between 3 and 8% of waking time). But what is the point of these permanent interruptions in visual processing? “ Because closing the eyelid disrupts the image on the retina, blinking is generally considered detrimental to visual processing », note the researchers of a new study published in the journal PNAS.
Eye blinks as a stage of visual processing
By combining monitoring ocularocular at high resolutionresolution of a dozen human observers with systems for spectral analysis of visual signals, the researchers show that blinking increases the power of retinal stimulation and that this effect even improves visibility despite the illusion of “lost time”.
Blinking the eyes not only moistens the cornea, but they also act as a step in processing visual information. Better still, they make it easier and largely compensate for the loss of exposure to the stimulus. “ By modulating visual input to the retina, eye blinks effectively reformat visual information, producing signals of luminanceluminance which differ radically from those we normally perceive when we look at a point in the scene », Specifies Michele Rucci, professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester (United States).
