Follow the Dot: Do we have implicit awareness of our own eye movements?

When asked where they have previously looked, people rarely report their visual behavior correctly. Similarly, people can seldom identify their own eye movements in recognition tasks, despite the large individual differences in gaze metrics previously established in literature. However, most tasks generally probe explicit awareness or memory of one’s own eye movements. It is unclear whether poor awareness extends to implicit awareness as well, which may speak to individual differences in gaze behaviour. To investigate this question, we designed a tracking paradigm that involved two tasks. First, participants (n=7) completed a classic visual search task while their eye movements were recorded. Next, participants completed a tracking task in which they were instructed to follow a moving red dot on the screen that replayed either their own previously recorded gaze position or that of another participant. During the replay portion, the dot was visible for 50% of the time, randomly disappearing for brief segments of time, and participants were instructed to move their eyes to where they believed the dot would appear next. Furthermore, replayed eye movements were either superimposed on the same stimulus array displayed during the search task, or on a plain grey background. Tracking accuracy was measured by calculating the cross-correlation between the previously recorded gaze position and the tracked positions. Our results show that, on average, people were not significantly better at tracking their own eye movements versus others (p = .20) and that people were not better at tracking the replayed eye movements when it was superimposed on the same stimulus array from the search task (p = .15). While tracking accuracy across conditions was overall very high (Fisher Z range: 0.85-1.11), our results suggest that poor awareness of one’s eye movements may extend to both explicit and implicit measures.