NEUROSCIENCE

Choice of saccade endpoint under risk

ABSTRACT

We ask whether human observers choose saccade endpoints that maximize expected gain when there are explicit rewards associated with correctly detecting the target in a visual search task. We compared human saccade endpoints to those of an ideal observer that maximizes expected gain given the respective map of target visibility as a function of retinal location. Varying the location of the highest reward had a significant effect on human observers’ distribution of saccade endpoints, but humans’ overall spatial distributions of saccade endpoints differed significantly from the ideal observer.