Microsaccades Do Not Give Rise to a Conscious Feeling of Agency for Their Sensorimotor Consequences in Visual Perception

Eye movements reflect our decision to closer inspect an aspect of the environment-bodily actions that align our perception with a preceding intention. Here, we investigated if microsaccades-a ballistic, minuscule type of saccade-can be characterized by a feeling of agency: the faint experience of affecting change through intentional actions. In two experiments, we presented an identical stimulus whose visibility was either gaze-contingent (active condition) or independent of eye movements (replay condition). In <b>Experiment 1</b>, we directly compared intended and unintended microsaccades and contrasted them with spontaneous microsaccades in <b>Experiment 2</b>. We found no difference between the active and replay condition for either eye movement type. Our data, hence, does not support feeling of agency for microsaccades. While it remains an open question if large saccades are characterized by feeling of agency, our finding demonstrates that intention is not sufficient to elicit feeling of agency for minuscule motor acts.