Measuring conscious tactile perception without report: pupil, blink, and microsaccade signatures of a tactile no-report paradigm

Threshold-level tactile air puffs on non-thumb fingers elicit stronger pupil dilation and more post-stimulus blinking than identical unperceived puffs, lasting 1–2 seconds.

• Why it matters: Report-based measures mix awareness signals with decision and motor processes, so no-report methods are needed to infer conscious touch from physiology alone.
• What they did: Using the Galileo stimulation system, participants received threshold-level puffs on both hands while eye movements were tracked; a stacked support vector machine trained on Report-hand eye metrics classified No-Report perception (AUC = .92).
• The result: The classifier separated perceived from not perceived No-Report trials with cross-validated accuracy of 72%, sensitivity of 90% at 80% specificity, and label-permutation p < .001.

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