Blinking and memory

Students at Christ Church are getting busy with experiments! Catalin Barbuceanu is one of them and gives us an insight in the work of a future psychologist.

In order to find out if “voluntary eyeblinks disrupt iconic memory”, Catalin Barbuceanu, a 3^rd year Psychology student at Canterbury Christ Church University carries on a very interesting experiment that will conclude at the beginning of June. More simply put, he struggles to figure out the degree of which blinking affects memory.

During his second year of study, Catalin had to figure out the area of psychology which he had to cover in order to complete his dissertation. With the help of his tutor, he decided to lead this experiment that would involve asking people to take part in a replicate study on sensorial memory.

Even though Christ Church offers a decent psychology lab for its students, Catalin preferred to work at home: “I found joy in the whole preparation of the experiment. In order to conduct it, I turned my room into a proper lab and used my own tools along with a professional software. People that I have asked are curious to find out if blinking affects their memory and willingly to take part in my research. ”

Basically, what a participant is asked to do is sit comfortably on a chair and look at a computer screen. He is shown a 3 x 3 group of letters, followed by one of three cue delays and then by a cue tone and a response prompt. Depending on the pitch of the tone (high, medium and low), the participant attempt to recall the top, the middle or the bottom row of the array.

On some trials, the participants are told to blink as soon as they saw the array; on other trials, they are told to keep their eyes open and fixated. The latency of voluntary blinks exceed the duration of the stimulus array by over 100 msec, so the blink does not prevent the participant from seeing the array

For its day to day application of the study, Catalin illustrated the example of a driver passing by a sign on the side of the road. If one blinks in the instant after observing the sign would that impair his memory of the actual sign?

“The area was also investigated by Professors Laura Thomas and David Irwin at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, some years ago” Catalin said; “ I thought it would be an interesting subject to look into for my dissertation.”

As the experiment is ongoing and the results were not yet analyzed, we will have to yet until June to find out the extent on which blinking affects our memory.