Spontaneous eye blinks as temporal markers of internal attention

Authors

Schneider, D., Oezdemir, S., Wascher, E., Arnau, S.

Abstract

Eye blinks are among the largest physiological artefacts in electroencephalography and are typically removed from neural recordings. Yet their timing may carry information about cognition. Here, we asked whether the temporal distribution of spontaneous blinks across trials provides a time-resolved behavioural signature of internal attentional focusing in working memory. In Experiment 1, blink-locked EEG analyses showed that blink timing was aligned with neural activity reflecting attentional focusing on a relevant internal representation. In Experiment 2, participants remembered the same visual information across conditions, but the relevant item was revealed either early, by a cue before report, or later, at report. Blink-frequency profiles shifted accordingly, increasing after the cue when selection was possible early and after the probe when selection was delayed. Post-cue blinks in the early-selection condition were also associated with better memory performance. Thus, more generally, spontaneous blinks provide an unobtrusive chronometric signal for tracking latent cognitive processing.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 09 Jul 2026.

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