Information processing during saccadic eye movements

Abstract Saccadic eye movements are made at least 100,000 times each day. It is well known that sensitivity to visual input is suppressed during saccades; recent evidence suggests that some kinds of information processing are suppressed as well. Suppression during saccades implies that processing occurs discretely (during eye fixations only), rather than continuously (during both fixations and saccades). We examined this issue in the context of the Posner and Snyder (1975) primed letter-matching task. We found that a prime viewed in one fixation had a larger influence on targets viewed in a second fixation when a long rather than a short saccade separated the two fixations. This result demonstrates that at least some information processing occurs during saccades.

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