Goossens HHLM, Van Opstal AJ. Differential effects of reflex blinks on saccade perturbations in humans. J Neurophysiol 103: 1685–1695, 2010. First published February 3, 2010; doi:10.1152/jn.00788.2009. Studies in both humans and monkeys have indicated that blinks affect the central programming of saccades. In this study, we compared the influence of two types of reflex blinks on the trajectorie...

Three experiments using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) tested participants' ability to detect targets in streams that are in motion. These experiments compared the ability to identify moving versus stationary RSVP targets and examined the attentional blink with pairs of targets that were moving or stationary. One condition presented RSVP streams in the center of the screen; a second co...

Eye blink measures have been shown to be diagnostic in detecting deception regarding past acts. Here we examined-across two experiments with increasing degrees of ecological validity-whether changes in eye blinking can be used to determine false intent regarding future actions. In both experiments, half of the participants engaged in a mock crime and then transported an explosive device with th...

Vision is suppressed during blinks and saccadic eye movements. We hypothesized that visual reaction times (RTs) in a vigilance test would be significantly increased when a blink or a saccade happened to coincide with the stimulus onset. Thirty healthy volunteers each performed a visual RT test for 15 min while their eye and eyelid movements were monitored by a system of infrared reflectance ocu...

PURPOSE To describe different patterns of blinking in patients undergoing a visual field test and to establish whether the blink parameters are related to threshold variability. METHODS Thirty-nine patients with diagnosed or suspected glaucoma were recruited to undertake a perimetric task twice. Blinks were detected with a video eye-tracker system that records at a sampling rate of 60 Hz. Bli...

Spontaneous eye blinking serves a critical physiological function, but it also interrupts incoming visual information. This tradeoff suggests that the inhibition of eye blinks might constitute an adaptive reaction to minimize the loss of visual information, particularly information that a viewer perceives to be important. To test this hypothesis, we examined whether the timing of blink inhibiti...

The dot-probe paradigm is one of the most often used paradigms to investigate attentional biases towards emotional information. However, a large number of the dot-probe studies so far used a long stimulus onset asynchrony allowing for eye movements to occur, which might increase the error variance. This study aimed at addressing this methodological issue by varying the instructions with regard ...