When was the last time you moved your eyes? Although we move our eyes multiple times per second, we are typically not aware of their movements. Nevertheless, we can bring them under voluntary control and decide to actively look at a certain object. But can we also consciously judge how accurate our eye movements are?
Such an awareness of task performance has been extensively studied for perceptual tasks in the context of research on confidence. Here we wanted investigate whether this is also possible for eye movements. For that observerd needed to track a noisy target and afterwards judge whether their performance was above or below their average tracking performance in the other trials.
Based on an ROC-like analysis, we observed that observers can do that significantly above chance, showing some sensorimotor confidence for eye movements. However, performance was only slightly above chance, and for example also significantly lower than for hand movements in a comparable task. Thus, suggesting that instead of actually having access to an error judgement for each eye movements, observers might be able to judge some more general level of attention that they had in each trial, which then correlated with task performancer.