Reduced Eye Blinking During Sentence Listening Reflects Increased Cognitive Load in Challenging Auditory Conditions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While blink analysis was traditionally conducted within vision research, recent studies suggest that blinks might reflect a more general cognitive strategy for resource allocation, including with auditory tasks, but its use within the fields of Audiology or Psychoacoustics remains scarce and its interpretation largely speculative. It is hypothesized that as listening conditions become more difficult, the number of blinks would decrease, especially during stimulus presentation, because it reflects a window of alertness. In experiment 1, 21 participants were presented with 80 sentences at different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs): 0, + 7, + 14 dB and in quiet, in a sound-proof room with gaze and luminance controlled (75 lux). In experiment 2, 28 participants were presented with 120 sentences at only 0 and +14 dB SNR, but in three luminance conditions (dark at 0 lux, medium at 75 lux, bright at 220 lux). Each pupil trace was manually screened for the number of blinks, along with their respective onset and offset. Results showed that blink occurrence decreased during sentence presentation, with the reduction becoming more pronounced at more adverse SNRs. Experiment 2 replicated this finding, regardless of luminance level. It is concluded that blinks could serve as an additional physiological correlate to listening effort in simple speech recognition tasks, and that it may be a useful indicator of cognitive load regardless of the modality of the processed information.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".