Boosted visual performance after eye blinks

We blink more often than required for maintaining the corneal tear film. It is unclear whether there are perceptual or cognitive consequences of blinks that may justify their high frequency. Recent findings showed that blinks occur at consistent time points and may indicate switches between large scale cortical networks, such as dorsal attention and default-mode networks. Thus, blinks may trigger a refresh of visual attention, although this has so far not been confirmed behaviourally. Here, we tested the effect of blinks on visual performance in a rapid serial visual presentation task. In Experiment 1, participants had to identify a target digit embedded in a random stream of letter distractors, presented foveally for 60 ms each. Participants blinked once during the presentation stream. In a separate condition, blinks were simulated by shutter glasses. We found enhancements of performance (up to 15% point increase in accuracy) for targets appearing up to 300 ms after blinks. This finding was replicated for object recognition with naturalistic stimuli (Experiment 2) and for spatially distributed stimuli (Experiment 4), but not in a numerosity task (Experiment 3). We also observed a later, suatained performance boost after blinks in five experiments. While the early performance boost may be partially based on retinal transients induced by blinks, the later boost signifies an attentional reset triggered by eye blinks. We conclude that eye blinks lead to attentional benefits in the period after reopening of the eyelids and may be used strategically for temporarily boosting visual performance.