Do they do this in the dark and is it correlated with light input.. so is the eye/brain responding to stimulus even though the eyes aren't open yet?
I dug a bit and was able to find this paper https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15289028/ , which seems to track my memory. It has a number of forward and backward citations if you are interested. Perhaps someone with far more than my vague recollection of a talk will step in though!