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Abstract:
Part of the "Grand Illusion" of complete and direct
perception is the transparency of our eye-movements. We simply
don?t notice them. The visual information from the retina that
supports visual consciousness is sampled discontinuously in the
brief fixations that normally occur two or three times per second.
Our eyes make abrupt movements called saccades nearly every second
of our waking lives. These eye "jumps" connect the individual
fixations we make, gathering visual information that underlies our
actions and our perceptual experience. Although often crucial to
the successful recovery of visual information in which we are
consciously interested, our eye movements are, by and large,
unconscious actions. They may be said to represent an aspect of the
information-gathering control structures postulated by Gibson
(1966), though they are not, themselves, part of our awareness.
Given the importance of eye-movements for the retrieval of visual
information from the environment, the question arises whether the
eye-movement control system is capable of implicit learning, or
learning without awareness. The present studies were undertaken to
investigate this possibility. Can eye-movement patterns show
learned sensitivity to environmental regularities of which we are
not consciously aware?
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