Abstract
People are unable to accurately report on their own eye movements most of the time. Can this be explained as a lack of attention to the objects we fixate? Here, we elicited eye-movement errors using the classic oculomotor capture paradigm, in which people tend to look at sudden onsets even when they are irrelevant. In the first experiment, participants were able to report their own errors on about a quarter of the trials on which they occurred. The aim of the second experiment was to assess what differentiates errors that are detected from those that are not. Specifically, we estimated the relative influence of two possible factors: how long the onset distractor was fixated (dwell time), and a measure of how much attention was allocated to the onset distractor. Longer dwell times were associated with awareness of the error, but the measure of attention was not. The effect of the distractor identity on target discrimination reaction time was similar whether or not the participant was aware they had fixated the distractor. The results suggest that both attentional and oculomotor capture can occur in the absence of awareness, and have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between attention, eye movements, and awareness.
Highlights
People are unable to accurately report on their own eye movements most of the time
It is important to note that an eye-movement error using this classification method does not necessarily mean that the participant looked at the onset; it only means they did not look directly at the target
In the preregistered report at this link, we report the results of a pilot experiment on 16 participants which we ran in order to verify that we would be able to observe congruency effects in our paradigm, and to define, test, and refine the analyses we would apply to the new set of data from 36 participants reported below, which we had not yet seen
Summary
People are unable to accurately report on their own eye movements most of the time. Can this be explained as a lack of attention to the objects we fixate? Here, we elicited eye-movement errors using the classic oculomotor capture paradigm, in which people tend to look at sudden onsets even when they are irrelevant. Most participants reported being unaware of the abrupt onset, and no participants reported that their eye movements were affected or captured by it Extending this further, Belopolsky et al (2008) used a similar task, but after each trial, participants were asked if they looked directly at the target. The results of these two studies are somewhat at odds (i.e. are participants unaware of all errors, or just some of them?) they do reinforce the conclusion that people have limited awareness of their own eye movements, even when they know that they will be asked to report on them, and even when these movements are large errors that negatively impact their performance
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