A very good question, and actually following up on this, it seems (broadly speaking) that trying to track something automatically goes into a different more elaborate circuit that does have feedback mechanisms and control. The demonstration I’d suggest is jsut picking up an object and moving it slowly while tracking it. Suddenly you can do it.
So, it seems I oversimplified in the post just writing something out of memory. It’s a kind of interesting limit on conscious control though==just trying to “move” your eyes clearly seems to be going somewhere different from “tracking” something.
(I’ve seen some vague reports on google about people claiming they can train themselves to go into takcing mode, but tough to say).
Hieronym
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Oh as someone with high myopia myself, yeah I’ve seen that too. I guess it’s not quite right to say never see it in everyday life. But for the point intended in the post I think it’s reasonable.
Nuances in the Workings of the Eye and Retina
This doesn’t even necessarily need cat-level intelligence. Cicada-killer wasps will adopt effectively arbitrary landmarks set out by humans as territorial markers: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003347299911338 . Here, it lowered fighting as much as 80%.
A more readable version perhaps: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/the-cicada-killers-are-coming/277688/
Sorry about all the paywalls. Of course you could argue that in the case of wasps there might be a hard-coded instinct to find a random line in the sand (so to speak) and use it as a territory definition.
I would add that that’s with a certain amount of malicious inputs in the mix (from trolls).
That is in fact a defect of these models and one of the things you can of want to scream into the screen after it, say, doesn’t walk more than 20 tiles to the right having spent days looking for an entrance that is 30 tiles to the right. Or when it doesn’t explore the bottom left of a room where the answer is because it’s convinced that’s not where it is.
Or the fact that it’s in week 2 of Silph co, driven by the fact that it’s convinced what it’s looking for is not an item on the ground, and not picking up any items even when walking right next to them, when in fact its goal is an item on the ground.
I’d heard something along these lines, but I didn’t find enough on it to make me do other than just present the traditional explanation on the matter. Do you have a reference?