Eye Movements and Action in Everyday Life

We are largely unaware of the importance of eye movements in gathering the visual information that is used by the brain to perform even the simplest everyday actions. Take, for example, the eye movements involved in making a sandwich. If we watch what the eyes are doing we will see that they make a series of rapid jumps from one place to another, every few hundred milliseconds, much more rapidly than we are aware of, gathering visual information and guiding the movements of the hands. These rapid shifts of the eye from one place to another are called saccadic eye movements and are one of the primary eye movements involved in gathering information from different locations in a visual scene. These movements are necessary because ...