Saccades to partially occluded objects: Perceptual completion mediates oculomotor control

Oculomotor behavior typically consists of directing gaze to objects in complex scenes for the purpose of extracting detailed perceptual information. Here, we probed the nature of the visual representations over which saccades to objects are computed. We contrasted an image-based oculomotor control hypothesis, holding that saccades are computed solely over information explicit in the retinal image, and an object-based oculomotor control hypothesis, holding that saccades are computed over object representations reflecting the three-dimensional structure of the scene. We recorded saccade landing positions to partially occluded objects in a naturalistic search task. In Experiment 1, saccade landing positions were biased toward the center of the perceptually completed object. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the bias held even when it would have been strategically advantageous to avoid it. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the bias was not due to image-level differences generated by the presence of occluders. The results indicate that saccade motor programs are computed, at least in part, over object-level representations reflecting the completion of occluded surfaces.