Unlike species with foveal vision such as men, monkeys, cats and dogs, rabbits do not show eye movements of the 'fixation' type when presented with some object that should arouse their interest, such as food or other animals.
Actually one can hardly observe any eye movements in a rabbit, unless the animal is actively moving around. Therefore it is not surprising that at one time the rabbit's oculomotor system was considered to be insensitive to optical stimuli. This idea, however, was conclusively disproved by the classic investigations of TER BRAAK (1936), who demonstrated that optokinetic reactions could easily and consistently be elicited in the rabbit by using the adequate stimulus. This stimulus consisted of rotation of the visual surroundings as a whole. The movement of isolated objects of any kind against a stationary background, on the other hand, did never produce any eye movements. TER BRAAK concluded that optokinetic reactions were elicited by movement of the retinal projection as a whole; the eye movement (slow phase of the optokinetic nystagmus) was directed such as to compensate for this. Moreover, TER BgAAK found that eye velocity during the slow phase of optokinetic nystagmus (OKN) approached the velocity of the surroundings (usually a striped drum), but never exceeded it. If the latter would occur, the sign of the stimulus and, presumably, of the reaction would be inverted. Though cybernetics was unknown as a discipline at that time, TER BRAAK actually described the system as a 'self-steering mechanism' ('Selbststeuerungsmechanismus').
Though it remains for modern neurophysiological techniques to unravel the details and especially the circuitry of the system, the physiologist of today can