ABSTRACT
Saccadic eye movements themselves have usually been studied while stationary viewers read or looked at pictures, but the eyes move quite similarly in many other situations. The fact that real eye movements have two purposeful antecedents— the posing of a visual question, and the likelihood of preceding extrafoveal glimpses—makes them very different from cuts between shots in moving pictures. In that shot, the woman appeared stationary, showing the importance of Gibsonian motion gradients. In C, in a series of shots that have no salient overlap or landmarks, but that clearly progresses from left to right within in an overall field of view, actors’ gaze direction seems to determine the resulting overview. The characters’ gaze directions have effectively overcome the column-as-landmark in A and the lamp-as-landmark in B. In fact, a freely moving viewer’s gaze touches the sites of planned actions long before those actions are undertaken.
