Race car drivers tend to blink at the same places in each lap - 2 views
www.sciencenews.org/...ula-one-race-car-drivers-blink
ArduinoScienceJournal app driving blinking vision research potential research idea biology engineering HSR HSR-2023 science statistical analysis car auto safety civilengineering blink HSR-2025 behavioralscience
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The world goes dark for about one-fifth of a second every time you blink, a fraction of an instant that’s hardly noticeable to most people. But for a Formula One race car driver traveling up to 354 kilometers per hour, that one-fifth means almost 20 meters of lost vision
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People are often thought to blink at random intervals, but researchers found that wasn’t the case for three Formula drivers.
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the drivers tended to blink at the same parts of the course during each lap, cognitive neuroscientist Ryota Nishizono and colleagues report in the May 19 iScience
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Interesting. So, do we do the same thing while driving around town? Could you design a method to record eye blinks as people drive known routes around town? We could simultaneously use the Arduino Science Journal app on the iPhone to also correlate physical data in a moving car like acceleration/deceleration, motion in X, Y, Z directions, etc. I wonder if we could find a correlation in everyday driving that could help from a safety perspective?
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He was surprised to find almost no literature on blinking behavior in active humans even though under extreme conditions like motor racing or cycling
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Nishizono and colleagues mounted eye trackers on the helmets of three drivers and had them drive three Formula circuits
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Where the drivers blinked was surprisingly predictable, the team found. The drivers had a shared pattern of blinking that had a strong connection with acceleration, such that drivers tended not to blink while changing speed or direction — like while on a curve in the track — but did blink while on relatively safer straightaways.
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“We think of blinking as this nothing behavior,” he says, “but it’s not just wiping the eyes. Blinking is a part of our visual system.”
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Nishizono next wants to explore what processes in the brain allow or inhibit blinking in a given moment, he says, and is also interested in how blinking behavior varies among the general population.