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The authors present an eye/head gaze controller based on recent findings in biological gaze control. Despite the absence of an explicit vestibulo-ocular (VOR) mechanism the model is able to produce classical VOR responses, and reject head perturbations during the saccadic portion of a gaze shift executed to a remembered target -- what is usually attributed to a separate vestibular mechanism. The authors argue that distinguishing between both types of responses is not justified, as each is a manifestation of one reflex system having different goals during the stages of gaze redirection., Paper presented at the Annual Int'l Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (23rd), held in Istanbul, Turkey, on 25-28 Oct 2001. See also ADM001351 for entire conference on cd-rom.

Work for the grant's second year progressed in four projects. The first, a report of distorted space processing in flickering fields, concerns empirical work completed. The second project extended this work to high-speed flicker, at 480 adn 960 Hz. No evidence was found that these high flicker rates have any advantages over slower rates, though some technical issues were resolved. The third project examined reading rates on CRT screens at 60 and 500 Hz. The faster rate resulted in reading that was on average 0.6 msec faster, a difference that is neither statistically reliable nor of practical consequence. Technical problems in that study were addressed in the fourth study, using more subjects and a larger and more difficult sample of reading material, with eye movement monitoring and an automatized screen refresh procedure. Initial results showed a small advantage in reading speed at the higher frequency for 4 to 6 subjects, and an overall advantage of 5 words/min at 500 Hz. Data collection is continuing in this project.