Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The role of intentions in motor planning is heavily weightedin classical psychological theories, but their role in generat-ing eye movements, and our awareness of these oculomotorintentions, has not been investigated explicitly. In this study,the extent to which we monitor oculomotor intentions, i.e.the intentions to shift one’s gaze towards a specific location,and whether they can be expressed in conscious experience,is investigated. A forced-choice decision task was developedwhere a pair of faces moved systematically across a screen.In some trials, the pair of faces moved additionally as soon asthe participants attempted to gaze at one of the faces, prevent-ing them from ever viewing it. The results of the experimentsuggest that humans in general do not monitor their eye move-ment intentions in a way that allows for mismatches betweenplanned gaze landing target and resulting gaze landing targetto be consciously experienced during decision-making.