The double-drift stimulus (a drifting Gabor with orthogonal internal motion) generates a large discrepancy between its physical and perceived path. Surprisingly, saccades directed to the double-drift stimulus land along the physical, and not perceived, path (Lisi M, Cavanagh P. Curr Biol 25: 2535−2540, 2015). We asked whether memory-guided saccades exhibited the same dissociation from perception. Participants were asked to keep their gaze centered on a fixation dot while the double-drift stimulus moved back and forth on a linear path in the periphery. The offset of the fixation was the go signal to make a saccade to the target. In the visually guided saccade condition, the Gabor kept moving on its trajectory after the go signal but was removed once the saccade began. In the memory conditions, the Gabor disappeared before or at the same time as the go-signal (0- to 1,000-ms delay) and participants made a saccade to its remembered location. The results showed that visually guided saccades again targeted the physical rather than the perceived location. However, memory saccades, even with 0-ms delay, had landing positions shifted toward the perceived location. Our result shows that memory- and visually guided saccades are based on different spatial information. NEW & NOTEWORTHY We compared the effect of a perceptual illusion on two types of saccades, visually guided vs. memory-guided saccades, and found that whereas visually guided saccades were almost unaffected by the perceptual illusion, memory-guided saccades exhibited a strong effect of the illusion. Our result is the first evidence in the literature to show that visually and memory-guided saccades use different spatial representations.

The initial saccade of experienced readers tends to land halfway between the beginning and the middle of words, at a position originally referred to as the preferred viewing location (PVL). This study investigated whether a simple physical manipulation—namely, increasing the saliency (brightness or color) of the letter located at the PVL—can positively influence saccadic targeting strategies and optimize reading performance. An eye-movement experiment was conducted with 25 adults and 24 s graders performing a lexical decision task. Results showed that this manipulation had no effect on initial landing positions in proficient readers, who already landed most frequently at the PVL, suggesting that PVL saliency is irrelevant once automatized saccade targeting routines are established. In contrast, the manipulation shifted the peak of the landing site distribution toward the PVL for a cluster of readers with immature saccadic strategies (with low reading-level scores and ILPs close to the beginning of words), but only in the brightness condition, and had a more compelling effect in a cluster with oculomotor instability (with flattened and diffuse landing position curves along with oculomotor and visuo-attentional deficits). These findings suggest that guiding the eyes toward the PVL may offer a novel way to improve reading efficiency, particularly for individuals with oculomotor and visuo-attentional difficulties.