What is it about?
Our eyes can tell a lot about what we are thinking. They are in motion all day long: gaze jumps around and the pupils grow and shrink. We asked participants to press buttons at their own pace, not prompted by any external event. It is known that a viewer can somewhat predict such spontaneous actions by observing the pupil: it grows before the action happens. We found that gaze also betrays upcoming actions: the eyes fixate more steadily ahead of time. In fact, our data suggest that a common neural pathway underlies both pupil and gaze behavior here.
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Why is it important?
These findings show that eye movement control interacts with control of body movements to an extent that was not previously appreciated. Practically, eye movement studies such as this one form a foundation for eye-based user interfaces, that track a user’s state and commands based on eye recordings.
Perspectives
One aspect that makes this article special to me is how extremely robust the drop in gaze displacements prior to button presses was. It is common for us to study effects that are real but that require averaging across many iterations or participants to surface. This phenomenon jumped out at us from the data, and was visible in a large majority of individual participants.
Jan Brascamp
Michigan State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Fixational saccade inhibition and pupil dilation during self-paced limb movement preparation, PLOS One, October 2025, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0335504.
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