Abstract
Saccades are unconsciously induced in everyday-life visual circumstances. Even if we are not aware of a target saccades are triggered toward the target. In this study we examined whether presenting a stimulus could induce saccades when the stimulus was not consciously detected. The stimulus was of 251 distractors and a target presented on a 40 × 30deg CRT display. They were achromatic Gabor stimuli of 2deg and 2c/deg. The background was 70 cd/m2 and the contrast of the Gabor was 30%. The target was temporally varied in luminance either with 5, 10, 15, 20 or 25 Hz. The distractors were stable. The stimulus duration was 200ms. The stimulus contained the target either in the first or in the second presentation. The observer's task was to search for the target no matter whether he could see it. He responded which presentation contained the target in the 2AFC manner. Saccades were defined as correct when the eye moved to the half of the display area which had the target. The results showed that the percentage correct of verbal and saccadic responses increased with the target temporal-frequency. In some conditions the saccadic responses were found to be higher in the percentage correct than the verbal responses. It seems likely that this difference in the percentage correct might be an indication that saccades are induced by the stimulus which we cannot detect. YIA