For tracking purists, our proposal that the tracking system occasionally outsources help from the oculomotor system may seem unsettling, but this practice of relying on eye movements to help resolve moment-by-moment behavioral crises is very likely the perceptual rule rather than the exception. Real-world perception happens at a frenzied pace; problems arise, and solutions are found, perhaps many times each second. Information from the selective allocation of gaze is probably an important part of many of these solutions. Even the coordination of very simple perceptual-motor tasks, such as making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (Land & Hayhoe,
2001), is sufficiently computationally demanding so as to require gaze to be directed to objects just moments before they are manually manipulated (see also Land, Mennie, & Rusted,
1999). Hayhoe and colleagues referred to these behaviors as “just in time” fixations, in recognition of the fact that these fixations acquire information to be used in the solution of an immediate perceptual problem (Aivar, Hayhoe, Chizk, & Mruczek,
2005; Ballard, Hayhoe, & Pelz,
1995; Droll, Hayhoe, Triesch, & Sullivan,
2005; Hayhoe, Bensinger, & Ballard,
1998; Hayhoe, Shrivastava, Mruczek, & Pelz,
2003; see Hayhoe & Ballard,
2005, for a review). In this sense, rescue saccades are just another example (albeit a very good one) of “just in time” gaze behavior, one tailored to a problem commonly encountered in a MOT task.