Eye movements of monkeys during learning of color and form discrimination problems involving reversal and nonreversal shifts

Eye movements of monkeys were measured during performance on a series of two-choice color and form discriminations which involved reversal and nonreversal shifts. Neither the amount of visual scanning nor the duration of individual fixations was related to the relevant dimension or to the type of shift. However, amount of scanning increased over the series of problems and was linearly related to the time to respond. The last fixation of a trial tended to be on the positive stimulus and a fixation near the end of a trial tended to be longer than one near the beginning.This research was supported by a research grant (GB-18953X) from the National Science Foundation to the first author. Part of the research served as the basis for the second author's doctoral dissertation (Vaughan, 1970).