Open your Eyes: Blink-induced Change Blindness while Reading

Reading assistants provide users with additional information through pop-ups or other interactive events which might interrupt the fow of reading. We propose that unnoticeable changes can be made in a given text during blinks while the vision is obscured for a short period of time. Reading assistants could make use of such change blindness to adapt text in real time and without infringing on the reading experience. We developed a system to study blink-induced change blindness. In two preliminary experiments, we asked five participants to read six short texts each. Once per text and during a blink, our system changed a predetermined part of each text. In each trial, the intensity and distance of the change were systematically varied. Our results show that text changes — although obvious to bystanders — were difcult to detect for participants. Concretely, while changes that afected the appearance of large text parts were detected in 80% of the occurrences, no line-contained changes were detected.

Kai Schultz, Kenan Bektaş, Jannis Strecker-Bischof, and Simon Mayer. 2025. Open your Eyes: Blink-induced Change Blindness while Reading. In Companion of the the 2025 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp Companion ’25), October 12–16, 2025, Espoo, Finland. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3714394.3754398