Topic summary
Saccadic movement
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Saccade.
Function
When scanning immediate surroundings or reading, human eyes make saccadic movements and stop several times, moving very quickly between each stop. The speed of movement during each saccade cannot be controlled; the eyes move as fast as they are able. One reason for the saccadic movement of the human eye is that the central part of the retina—known as the fovea—which provides the high-resolution portion of vision is very small in humans, only about 1–2 degrees of vision, but it plays a critical role in resolving objects. Saccades allow the eyes to sense small parts of a scene with greater resolution and thereby allow the brain to assemble these parts into a coherent, continuous mental representation.