What you wrote there piqued my interest in the context of the saccadic masking referenced in the article. I'm familiar with the phenomenom, particularly when you're reading your eyes jump from block to block of text and it's pretty obvious that you're only processing the image while the eyes are fixed. Yet, I do no believe that the article's elaboration is correct. It's not true that "your eyes are incable of moving smoothly across it and seeing everything", that the eyes can only process in the pauses, or that the brain "actually blocks the image while your eyes are moving." It's not true that "the only exception" is when you're tracking an object.

I know this because because when I make circular eye movements the world moves in a smooth circle. I can move my eyes left and right, and the images appear to continuously move. Maybe not everyone can do this, but in that case one could look to the corner of his eye, move his head the other way and see the same thing. So the brain does not synchronize image processing with either eye muscles, nor somehow with a neural filter on the movement of the image. So what's the deal with saccadic pausing?

I think it's related to cognitive association, in the same way we filter out white noise or rhythmic noise. Along with the rest of the what, 90% of our filtered out sensory perceptions. There are also some pre-processing spacial filters involved in ways I don't understand (or maybe no one yet does) but what I'm getting at is that his explanation has it backwards. I suspect that it's not some neural hard-wiring and optical interface preventing the brain from processing the images - it's the brain's programming disregarding the input!

The consequence doesn't disprove his suggestion that drivers are very unlikely to change their behavior, but it would discredit his surmise that it would be impossible in the first place.

Perhaps the Gestalt Laws of Organization have some validity?