Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 1997 Aug 29;352(1358):1231-9.
doi: 10.1098/rstb.1997.0105.

The knowledge base of the oculomotor system

Affiliations
Review

The knowledge base of the oculomotor system

M F Land et al. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. .

Abstract

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.

PubMed Disclaimer

Similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Nature. 1995 Sep 28;377(6547):339-40 - PubMed
    1. Vision Res. 1996 Sep;36(17):2665-74 - PubMed
    1. Sci Am. 1968 Aug;219(2):88-95 - PubMed
    1. Vision Res. 1974 Jul;14(7):589-92 - PubMed
    1. Percept Psychophys. 1986 Jan;39(1):47-58 - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources