9/n Bottom line: Intention acts as a gate to sensorimotor awareness. Even at the scale of microsaccades, simply intending to move (or to hold still) boosts our ability to notice the action—while visual consequences alone don’t help.

8/n Awareness of the eye movement itself, however, was low for spontaneous microsaccades but higher when a movement was intended or occurred despite attempts to fixate.

7/n We found that visual sensitivity was high whenever a microsaccade (real or replayed) slowed the stimulus on the retina—regardless of whether the action was intended, unintended, or spontaneous.

6/n After each trial, participants reported whether they saw the stimulus, whether they thought they made a microsaccade, and how confident they were that their eye movement caused what they saw.

5/n To tease apart motor commands from visual feedback, we used a rapidly phase-shifting stimulus that’s invisible during steady gaze but pops into view when retinal motion slows—either due to a real microsaccade or a replay of its retinal trace. No-stim trials acted as controls.

4/n Our approach involved directly comparing three types of microsaccades:
• Intended (consciously planned)
• Unintended (executed despite intention to fixate)
• Spontaneous (uncontrolled or automatic)

3/n We developed a novel paradigm that allowed us to dissociate the role of action intention and sensory consequences for awareness.

2/n Sven Ohl, Martin Rolfs (@rolfslab.bsky.social), and I investigated how intention modulates awareness of one of the smallest human actions: microsaccades—tiny eye movements typically generated spontaneously during fixation.

3/n We developed a novel paradigm that allowed us to dissociate the role of action intention and sensory consequences for awareness.

2/n Sven Ohl, Martin Rolfs (@rolfslab.bsky.social bsky.social ), and I investigated how intention modulates awareness of one of the smallest human actions: microsaccades—tiny eye movements typically generated spontaneously during fixation.