Eye movements of stumptailed monkeys during discriminative performance: An overview

Abstract

There are a number of statements that can be made about eye movements of monkeys during the learning of simple and complex discriminative problems that are probably applicable to a wide variety of visual tasks. There are systematic changes in eye movements as a function of practice. Some of these changes occur long after grosser measures of performance, such as frequency of correct choices, have reached an asymptote. Hence, short-term studies of visual information processing may be misleading. Duration of visual fixations and frequency of visual fixations are independent measures, reflecting different cognitive processes. Studies which measure only total looking time confound these two measures and, thus, may miss important information. Eye movements appear to be an important, if not essential, component of the chain of events constituting the cognitive processing underlying performance on visual tasks.