You don't get information until you need it. Hayhoe's computer science colleagues have already found that skills like saccades, not megabytes of memory, are the key to smart, versatile robots. In their work with the Rochester Robot, Rochester scientists have mimicked the way humans execute simple tasks. Giving the robot some of the flexibility humans have, such as programming the robot to move its camera eyes just as humans do, simplifies its tasks and enhances its abilities. With no remote control and in real time, the robot has dodged tennis balls, played checkers, manipulated children's toys, searched for and identified objects such as cereal boxes and stuffed animals, and performed a variety of tasks.
Saccades are the fastest movements humans can make.
Our eyes, with the help of half a dozen muscles, are constantly darting from word to word on a page or from face to face in a crowd. We make roughly 100,000 to 200,000 saccades a day, yet we don't even notice because they're so automatic. Jeff Pelz, a graduate student in CVS, found that when people are asked to copy a pattern of building blocks, they don't rely on an image stored in their brain but instead on hundreds of saccades through which they compare the original with the duplicate they're making. Instead, your eyes are constantly going back and forth, picking up little bits of information, and checking that information again and again. It's really quite elegant.