THE KNOWLEDGE-BASE OF THE OCULOMOTOR SYSTEM

In everyday life, eye movements enable the eyes to gather the informat ion required for motor actions. They are thus proactive, anticipating actions rather than just responding to stimuli. This means that the oc ulomotor system needs to know where to look and what to look for. Usin g examples from table tennis, driving and music reading we show that t he information the eye movement system requires is very varied in orig in and highly task specific, and it is suggested that the control prog ram or schema for a particular action must ab include directions for t he oculomotor and visual processing systems. In many activities (readi ng text and music, typing, steering) processed information is held in a memory buffer for a period of about a second. This permits a match b etween the discontinuous input from the eyes and continuous motor outp ut, and in particular allows the eyes to be involved in more than one task.