This approach is always subject to the criticism that results may not be of general applicability. In this talk, I shall consider the validity of this criticism in relation to work on the saccadic system The most frequent use of saccades is to scan around the visual environment. However much work on the saccadic system investigates saccadic orienting to simple targets which appear suddenly. The onset visual transient of such targets will preferentially stimulate the magnocellular pathways of the visual system.
Visual search offers a way of investigating display scanning in a controlled situation.
A typical search experiment requires subjects to search for a pre-specified target amidst a number of distracter elements. The first factor is visual similarity to the target, reflecting the operation of the search selection set adopted by the subject. The second is spatial proximity to the current fixation location. These factors are likely to be dominant ones in many scanning situations. This is illustrated by a recent study of scanpaths through a set of randomly positioned objects.