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When a distractor appears in close proximity to a saccade target, the saccadic end point is biased towards the distractor. This so-called global effect reduces with the latency of the saccade if the saccade is visually guided. We recently reported that the global effect does not reduce with the latency of a double-step memory-guided saccade. The aim of this study was to investigate why the global effect in memory-guided saccades does not show the typically observed reduction with saccadic latency. One possibility is that reduction of the global effect requires continuous access to visual information about target and distractor locations, which is lacking in the case of a memory-guided saccade. Alternatively, participants may be inclined to routinely preprogram a memory-guided saccade at the moment the visual information disappears, with the result that a memory-guided saccade is typically programmed on the basis of …