1 Image (a) from A. L. Yarbus (1967), Eye Movements and Vision (New York: Plenum Press), reprinted by permission; image (b) from Keith Rayner and Monica Castelhano (2007), ‘Eye movements’, Scholarpedia, 2(10): 3649, http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Eye_movements.
2 J. K. O’Regan and A. Noë (2001), ‘A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(5): 939–73; R. A. Rensink (2000), ‘Seeing, sensing, and scrutinizing’, Vision Research, 40(10): 1469–87.
3 Reprinted from Brian A. Wandell, Foundations of Vision (Stanford University): https://foundationsofvision.stanford.edu.
4 L. Huang and H. Pashler (2007), ‘A Boolean map theory of visual attention’, Psychological Review, 114(3): 599, Figure 8.
5 If so, then we might expect some interesting effects of the colour grids stabilized on the retina, e.g. that patterns corresponding to individual colours might be seen, with the rest of the grid entirely invisible. This has not, to my knowledge, been attempted, but it would be a fascinating experiment.
6 Patterns can also be ‘shrink-wrapped’ by sharing properties other than colour – for example, being lines with the same slant, or items which are all moving in synchrony (like a flock of birds).
7 J. Duncan (1980), ‘The locus of interference in the perception of simultaneous stimuli’, Psychological Review, 87(3): 272–300.
8 Huang and Pashler (2007), ‘A Boolean map theory of visual attention’, Figure 10.
9 Note, though, that the perception of the colour of each patch will be influenced by neighbouring patches; indeed, the perceived colour of any individual patch on the image is determined by the comparison of that specific patch with neighbouring patches in a very complex and subtle way (for an early and influential theory, see E. H. Land and J. J. McCann (1971), ‘Lightness and retinex theory’, Journal of the Optical Society of America, 61(1): 1–11). The key, and remarkable, point is that, none the less, the output of this interactive process is sequential: we can only see one colour at a time.
10 D. G. Watson, E. A. Maylor and L. A. Bruce (2005), ‘The efficiency of feature-based subitization and counting’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 31(6): 1449.
11 Masud Husain (2008), ‘Hemineglect’, Scholarpedia, 3(2): 3681, http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hemineglect.
12 Nigel J. T. Thomas, ‘Mental Imagery’, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.): http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/mental-imagery/.
13 The remarkable video of this interaction can be found online at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4odhSq46vtU>.