The knowledge base of the oculomotor system

• Published in: Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological sciences Vol. 352; no. 1358; pp. 1231 - 1239
• Main Authors: Land, Michael F., Furneaux, Sophie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England The Royal Society 29.08.1997
• Subjects: Automobiles; Cognition - physiology; Eye movements; Eye Movements - physiology; Eyes; Humans; Music reading; Oculomotor Nerve - physiology; Saccades; Steering; Table tennis; Tangents; Trajectories; Visual fixation
• ISSN: 0962-8436; 1471-2970
• DOI: 10.1098/rstb.1997.0105

In everyday life, eye movements enable the eyes to gather the information required for motor actions. They are thus proactive, anticipating actions rather than just responding to stimuli. This means that the oculomotor system needs to know where to look and what to look for. Using examples from table tennis, driving and music reading we show that the information the eye movement system requires is very varied in origin and highly task specific, and it is suggested that the control program or schema for a particular action must include directions for the oculomotor and visual processing systems. In many activities (reading text and music, typing, steering) processed information is held in a memory buffer for a period of about a second. This permits a match between the discontinuous input from the eyes and continuous motor output, and in particular allows the eyes to be involved in more than one task.