ABSTRACT
Listing’s law states that, with the head stationary and the eyes fixating a distant target, the rotation axes between a head- and an eye-fixed coordinate system lie in a plane. Since Helmholtz many scientists have speculated about the purpose of Listing’s law. One approach has been to derive Listing’s law from Donders’ law and further functionally meaningful assumptions, using rigorous mathematics. The many theoretical justifications of Listing’s law are satisfactory from a modern control theory point of view, since they show how well input and output are matched in visuomotor integration. Listing’s law has been generalized to relate stereovision to vergence and to eye movements in eye-head coordination. Listing’s law states that, with the head stationary and the eyes fixating a distant target, the rotation axes between a head- and an eye-fixed coordinate system lie in a plane.
