Planning and Producing Saccadic Eye Movements

Abstract

Each day, as people explore their visual worlds, they produce more than 150,000 saccadic eye movements (Robinson, 1981a). Saccades serve the important role of bringing a new array of stimuli onto the fovea, allowing an observer to inspect some previously uninspected part of their environment. In order to learn more about the processes involved in perception in general, researchers have turned to learning more about details of the mechanisms that underlie the production of saccades. The belief is that a better understanding of the processes involved in guiding movements of the eyes might lead to insight into the other psychological mechanisms underlying perception and visual cognition.