Post-saccadic oscillations in eye movement data recorded with pupil-based eye trackers reflect motion of the pupil inside the iris

•It is unclear how accurately post-saccadic eye movements are represented in data collected with pupil-based eye trackers.•We recorded eye movement data and eye images from participants conducting horizontal saccades.•Eye movement data and movement of the pupil center correlated well, but not eye movement data and movement of the iris center.•Results show that the pupil moves relative to the iris during post-saccadic eye movements.•The relative pupil/iris motion complicates the decision of where a fixation ends and a saccade begins.

Current video eye trackers use information about the pupil center to estimate orientation and movement of the eye. While dual Purkinje eye trackers suffer from lens wobble and scleral search coils may be influenced by contact lens slippage directly after saccades, it is not known whether pupil-based eye trackers produces similar artifacts in the data. We recorded eye movements from participants making repetitive, horizontal saccades and compared the movement in the data with pupil- and iris movements extracted from the eye images. Results showed that post-saccadic instabilities clearly exist in data recorded with a pupil-based eye tracker. They also exhibit a high degree of reproducibility across saccades and within participants. While the recorded eye movement data correlated well with the movement of the pupil center, the iris center showed only little post-saccadic movement. This means that the pupil moves relative to the iris during post-saccadic eye movements, and that the eye movement data reflect pupil movement rather than eyeball rotation. Besides introducing inaccuracies and additional variability in the data, the pupil movement inside the eyeball influences the decision of when a saccade should end and the subsequent fixation should begin, and consequently higher order analyses based on fixations and saccades.