THE SPATIAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SCANNING SACCADES AND EXPRESS SACCADES

When monkeys interrupt their saccadic scanning of a visual scene to lo ok at a suddenly appearing target, saccades to the target are made aft er an ''express'' latency or after a longer ''regular'' latency. The p urpose of this study was to analyze the spatial patterns of scanning, express, and regular saccades, Scanning patterns were spatially biased , Express saccade patterns were biased, too, and mere directly correla ted with scanning patterns, Regular saccade patterns were more uniform and were not directly correlated with scanning patterns, Express sacc ades, but not regular saccades, seemed to be facilitated by preparatio n to scan. This study contributes to a general understanding of how mo nkeys examine scenes containing both unchanging and suddenly appearing stimuli, (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.