Learning patterns of eye motion for foveal pursuit.

Two human subjects fixated a small light oscillating sinusoidally. After the light disappeared, sinusoidal post-pursuit eye motion (PPEM) continued to follow the unexpected trajectory of targets oscillating at 0.8 and 1.0 Hz. Saccades corrected differences between eye and expected target position during PPEM in complete darkness. Predictive tracking, the ability of primates to accurately fixate even rapidly moving targets, may thus involve learning specific eye movement patterns that mimic target motion.