ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the compelling aspects of peripherally viewed stimuli and the dynamic aspects of saccades as they are executed in order that specific features of those stimuli can be identified. Just and Carpenter in their interesting work on eye movements and mental rotation make the assumption that the visual picture can be treated as a set of symbols, spatially separated. Their analysis starts from the idea that "the eye fixates the referent of the symbol currently being processed". The chapter focuses on an experiment with the idea that the amount of contour in a region might be an "interesting bit of structure" in Gibson's terms and thus draw the fovea towards it. The calculation of saccade amplitude is affected by the global properties of target configuration. This once again suggests that local spatial detail is ignored by, and is possibly unavailable to, the saccade control system. This occurs identically in the left visual field and the right visual field.
