4/10/25 Zengbo Xie
CCN Brown Bag
Zengbo Xie
Graduate Student
Date: Thursday, April 10, 2025
Time: 12:10-1pm
Location: Wilson Hall 316
Schrödinger’s blink: Can we be passive observers of our own behavior?
Investigating the role of awareness in motor control is challenging because most actions are performed consciously. We have recently exploited eye blinking as a novel paradigm to tease apart awareness and motor control as blinking is a behavior that can be done both unconsciously and consciously. In the present series of experiments, we assessed whether the mere awareness of blinking affects the act of blinking. We employed infrared eye-tracking and video analysis to examine blinking patterns and kinematics in healthy young adults while participants were engaged in spontaneous blinking, conscious blinking and voluntary blinking. The results revealed that not only does awareness affect blinking, but it may also morph spontaneous blinks into voluntary blinks. Evidently, the mere act of becoming conscious of blinking inevitably affects that behavior.