ABSTRACT
Levy-Schoen and Rigaut-Renard and Levy-Schoen, among others, showed that fixation durations can be determined directly by the combination of the processing done at the current fixation plus processing done on the basis of partial information available in peripheral vision when the eye was at the preceding fixation. The preparation of a less constrained routine of eye adjustment could induce a global program for the length of time the eye will remain at every element and there would be no need for moment-to-moment adjustment on the basis of local processing. However, fixation durations could depend not only on the amount of processing but also on oculomotor factors related to the scanning strategies used by the subject. The correlation found for accurate sequences between fixation duration and preceding saccade size, cannot be explained by a preprocessing factor, because these symbols are indistinguishable in non-central vision.
