Sensorimotor confidence for tracking eye movements

Abstract

For successful interactions with the world, we often have to evaluate our own performance. Although eye movements are one of the most frequent actions we perform, we are typically unaware of them. Here, we investigated whether there is any evidence for metacognitive sensitivity for the accuracy of eye movements. Participants tracked a dot cloud as it followed an unpredictable sinusoidal trajectory and then reported if they thought their performance was better or worse than their average tracking performance. Our results show above-chance identification of better tracking behavior across all trials and also for repeated attempts of the same target trajectories. Sensitivity in discriminating performance between better and worse trials was stable across sessions, but judgements within a trial relied more on performance in the final seconds. This behavior matched previous reports when judging the quality of hand movements, although overall metacognitive sensitivity for eye movements was significantly lower.