The Eye: A Very Short Introduction by Michael F. Land

Author:Michael F. Land
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191669804
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2014-05-21T04:00:00+00:00

Do we know where we are looking?

We often classify actions as ‘voluntary’ or ‘reflex’, but this doesn’t really capture the essence of what is happening. It is true that we can decide to direct our gaze to some particular feature—just as we can consciously control our breathing—but we rarely intrude in this way into a process that normally proceeds, unsupervised, according to its own rules. The batsmen in the last section did not know they made a saccade that took their eyes to the bounce point, and motorists are unlikely to be able to tell you which road features they looked at to judge how much to turn the steering wheel. The eye movement system has its own rules, and its own knowledge base, and ‘we’ are rarely in charge. Fixation strategies, it seems, are learned and elaborated, piecemeal and without instruction, from birth through into adulthood. Very few instruction manuals, whether concerned with DIY, piano playing, driving, or sport, actually tell you where to look. This is quite surprising, given that the crucial role of the eye movement system is to know where to look to get the information that will allow the action to proceed. As pointed out earlier, many parts of the brain are involved in making eye movements and deciding where to look, and there is no single control centre that directs gaze moment by moment. At present we have no coherent theory of gaze control.

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