If the external world becomes less important, there is less need to explore it, which again would result in a reduced need to move our eyes (i.e., fewer saccades) or even keep them open (i.e., more blinking). The reasoning behind this is as follows: If music causes attention to turn “inward”, then the external world should become less important. ![]() Schäfer and Fachner therefore measured eye movements as a sort of window to the music-incubated mind. Schäfer and Fachner wanted to provide empirical data on how music evokes “physiological changes in the processing of visual information” by investigating the role of attention.Īttention and eye movements are tightly coupled. Previous data from subjective reports had shown that “music causes attention to turn away from the environment (exogenous stimuli) and toward inward experiences (endogenous stimuli)”, sometimes even described as “space ceasing to exist”. Schäfer and Fachner recently published a paper in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, a journal of the Psychonomic Society, in which they took a closer look at participants’ eye movements while they listened to music. The secret weapon against outside intrusion of their own thoughts seems to be a set of earphones.Īs someone who usually tracks people’s eye movements to get a better notion of how we attend to our visual world, it is hard to imagine eyes that don’t move for the purpose of information gathering, but are merely a by-product of attending to inner thoughts. ![]() With vacant eyes, they look like they have successfully separated themselves from their perceptual environment. ![]() When riding on a bus or the subway these days, I tend to be surrounded by people who seem to exist in a different space.
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