The theme of this book developed gradually as my teaching of perception evolved in courses and seminars, first at Connecticut College, in New London, and later at that remarkable research institution, the University of Wisconsin, Madison. My belief in the importance of the search for underlying mechanism in the explication of psychological phenomena, however, began still earlier at the New School for Social Research with my teachers Irvin Rock, Hans Wallach, Solomon Asch, and Mary Henle, and my peer group, Bill Epstein, Lloyd Kaufman, Martin Lindauer, and Carl Zuckerman. It was a wonderfully stimulating zeitgeist where phenomenology met the firm constraints of empiricism and where the democratic ethos worked its way into the classrooms so that challenges to current ideology were expected and encouraged.

Hopefully this attitude was not lost on my past graduate students, many of whom, like Judith Callan, Paul Dubois, S. K. Fisher, Ken Paap, and Wayne Shebilske, contributed to the empirical corpus of evidence that has helped to solidify the view that oculomotor systems underlie various aspects of perception, and thereby provide a theoretical alternative or at least a necessary complement to cognitive and computational explanations. And to all of my former students, including Tim Babler, Terry Benzschawel, Karl Citek, Changmin Duan, Gerry Glaser, Gordon Redding, Martin Steinbach, Mike Streibel, and John Utrie, who have distinguished themselves in all manner of endeavor, I wish to express my genuine appreciation for their curiosity, and above all for their commitment to learn the ways of truth seeking in science.

To Karl Citek, S. K. Fisher, Gerry Glaser, Wayne Shebilske, and Bob Welch, I am especially grateful for their helpful comments on various portions of this work.