Eye Movements: Viewing the Window of Opportunity

When searching with our eyes, parallel programming of successive eye movements ensures that visual information arriving too late to alter the direction of one eye movement can still influence the direction of the next. Paradoxically, we can use random noise to probe the time period over which visual information influences where next to direct our gaze. Saccadic eye movements direct our eyes towards a target of interest. Because these movements are so fast, and because the transmission of information from the eye to the centres in the brain that control eye movements is not instantaneous, they cannot be guided by visual feedback but rather must be pre-programmed and then executed in a ballistic fashion. There is a small ‘dead period ’ of around 80 millisecond