Dr Tamami Nakano, of Tokyo University, said: “We seem to be unconsciously searching for a good timing for a blink to minimize the chance of losing critical information during the blink.”
Dr Nakano, whose findings are published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, said: “Spontaneous eyeblinks were synchronized both within and across subjects when they viewed the same video stories.“This blink synchronization was not observed when they viewed background videos that did not contain any story or when they listened to a narrated story.
“Thus, the synchronization required a story, but the need to follow a storyline per se was not the cause of synchronization.
“The blink synchrony occurred only when subjects had to follow a storyline by extracting information from a stream of visual events.”
