Blink rate variability: a marker of sustained attention during a visual task

Abstract

Eye blinks are vital components of human gaze which are used for assessing human behaviour. We have analyzed the variability of the inter-blink durations, termed as blink rate variability (BRV), for analysing sustained attention for visual tasks. Uniformly sampled BRV series is reconstructed from the gaze data recorded using an eye tracker. A number of features are extracted from this series. We proposed a new feature based on pareto principle. Results show that skewness, kurtosis, mean frequency and pareto frequency are good indicators of sustained attention. We observed that with increase in attention level, the power of BRV series tends to have a normal distribution whereas the mean and pareto frequency decreases. Results were generated on a small dataset as a proof of concept of our hypothesis that BRV is a potential bio-marker of sustained attention in a visual task.