The eyes anticipate where objects will move based on their shape.

Imagine staring into a clear river, starving, desperately searching for a fish to spear and cook. You see a dark shape lurking beneath the surface. It doesn't resemble any sort of fish you've encountered before - but you're hungry. To catch it, you need to anticipate which way it will move when you lunge for it, to compensate for your own sensory and motor processing delays. Yet you know nothing about the behaviour of this creature, and do not know in which direction it will try to escape. What cues do you then use to drive such anticipatory responses? Fortunately, many species, including humans, have the remarkable ability to predict the directionality of objects based on their shape - even if they are unfamiliar and so we cannot rely on semantic knowledge about their movements. While it is known that such directional inferences can guide attention, we do not yet fully understand how such causal inferences are made, or the extent to which they enable anticipatory behaviours. Does the oculomotor system, which moves our eyes to optimise visual input, use directional inferences from shape to anticipate upcoming motion direction? Such anticipation is necessary to stabilise the moving object on the high-resolution fovea of the retina while tracking the shape, a primary goal of the oculomotor system, and to guide any future interactions. Here, we leveraged a well-known behaviour of the oculomotor system: anticipatory smooth eye movements (ASEM), where an increase in eye velocity is observed in the direction of a stimulus' expected motion, before the stimulus actually moves, to show that the oculomotor system extracts directional information from shape, and uses this inference to predict and anticipate upcoming motion.