Task-relevant information availability shapes eye movements and perceptual judgment confidence

Abstract

Abstract Humans continuously decide where to look to gather task-relevant information. While affective rewards such as money are known to bias gaze direction, it remains unclear whether non-affective informational value can similarly shape oculomotor decisions. Here, we modulated the availability of task-relevant visual information at saccade targets by probabilistically varying its presentation duration, in a perceptual judgment task performed by human participants. Results showed that participants developed implicit biases, increasingly avoiding an experimentally introduced low-information region. These learned preferences were associated with longer saccade latencies toward non-preferred regions, similar to patterns observed with affective reward learning. However, saccade peak velocity remained unchanged across locations. Perceptual accuracy was not influenced either. When participants’ confidence ratings reliably distinguished correct from incorrect responses, confidence was higher for preferred regions, suggesting a dissociation between perceptual and metacognitive performance. These findings demonstrate that the probability of accessing easily usable information can be implicitly learned to guide eye movement decisions, much like reward. Moreover, subjective confidence can be linked to learned preferences, without modulation of perceptual performance. Our results highlight that informational value, independent of affective cues, shapes oculomotor decision-making and post-perceptual judgment confidence.

Keywords

• Implicit learning
• Selection history
• Decision making
• Metacognition
• Saccades