Eyeblinking During Problem Solving: The Effect of Problem Difficulty and Internally vs Externally Directed Attention

This study examined the eyeblink rate during non‐visual problem solving. A 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design compared eyeblink rates for easy and difficult problems, internally and externally directed attention, and numerical and alphabetical tasks. The major finding was a higher eyeblink rate for difficult problems. There was also a significant interaction between difficulty and the direction of attention; internally directed attention yielded higher blink rates only during the solution of easy problems. Range‐corrected data yielded the same pattern of results, but F‐values were consistently higher and accounted for a larger proportion of the variance.