title: Subjective report of eye fixations during serial search.
abstract: Humans readily introspect upon their thoughts and their behavior, but how reliable are these subjective reports? In the present study, we explored the consistencies of and differences between the observer's subjective report and actual behavior within a single trial. On each trial of a serial search task, we recorded eye movements and the participants' beliefs of where their eyes moved. The comparison of reported versus real eye movements revealed that subjects successfully reported a subset of their eye movements. Limits in subjective reports stemmed from both the number and the type of eye movements. Furthermore, subjects sometimes reported eye movements they actually never made. A detailed examination of these reports suggests that they could reflect covert shifts of attention during overt serial search. Our data provide quantitative and qualitative measures of observers' subjective reports and reveal experimental effects of visual search that would otherwise be inaccessible.
authors.affiliation: INSERM, U992, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France; CEA, DSV/I2BM, NeuroSpin Center, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France. Electronic address: Sebastien.marti@yahoo.fr.
authors.forename: Sébastien
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Marti
authors.affiliation: INSERM, U992, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France; CEA, DSV/I2BM, NeuroSpin Center, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France.
authors.forename: Laurie
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Bayet
authors.affiliation: INSERM, U992, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France; CEA, DSV/I2BM, NeuroSpin Center, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France; Collège de France, F-75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Stanislas
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Dehaene
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D053483:Eye Movement Measurements; D005133:Eye Movements; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Attention; Consciousness; Eye movements; Introspection; Metacognition; Subjective reports; Visual search