The autokinetic reports of 64 male Ss reflected to a significant extent the direction of compensatory eye movements which had been experimentally manipulated using a retinal image displacement technique. A tracking device was used to record the seconds per trial that the stimulus appeared in each of four visual field quadrants, a temporal measure of magnitude, latency, and direction of initial movement. The results suggest compensatory eye movements associated with the maintenance of single-point binocular fixation and consequent reduction of the disruptive effects of heterophorically stimulated fixation disparity, as the visual mechanism primarily responsible for the autokinetic phenomenon.
