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Everything about Saccade

Eye movement

In vision science, a saccade is a quick, simultaneous movement of both eyes between two or more phases of focal points in the same direction. In contrast, in smooth-pursuit movements, the eyes move smoothly instead of in jumps. Controlled cortically by the frontal eye fields (FEF), or subcortically by the superior colliculus, saccades serve as a mechanism for focal points, rapid eye movement, and the fast phase of optokinetic nystagmus. The word appears to have been coined in the 1870s by the French ophthalmologist Émile Javal, who used a mirror on one side of a page to observe eye movement in silent reading and found that it involves a succession of discontinuous individual movements. These movements quickly scan objects of attention and aid the brain in grasping a scene visually. Wikipedia →

🧭 Start here: a 6-step reading path

  1. Read the overview: SaccadeA 5-minute orientation
  2. Skim a recent paper: Distinguishing externally from saccade-induced motion in visual cortexInfluential work since 2022
  3. Pick up a classic book: Models of horizontal eye movementsThe most-reprinted book on the subject
  4. Read the landmark paper: Saccade target selection and object recognition: Evidence for a common attentional mechanismCited 1,551 times
  5. Go sideways: Fixation (visual)A closely related topic
  6. Go sideways: MicrosaccadeA closely related topic

📖 Definitions

Noun A rapid movement of the eye (either voluntary or involuntary) from one focus to another. (Often described as a jerky movement, but this word denotes all such quick eye movements, which happen continually, not just exaggerated or weird ones, and not nystagmus.)

Noun The act of checking a horse quickly with a single strong pull of the reins.

Noun The sounding of two violin strings together by using a sudden strong pressure of the bow.

Noun Any sudden jerking movement.

🗂️ The subject at a glance

  1. Function
  2. Timing and kinematics
  3. Types
  4. In depth
  5. Pathophysiologic saccades
  6. Saccade adaptation
  7. Reading
  8. Vision
  9. Comparative physiology
  10. Saccade-induced retrieval enhancement

🏆 Landmark papers (most cited)

🆕 Influential since 2022

📚 Books worth reading

Ranked by number of editions on Open Library, a rough measure of how lasting a book is.

🔗 Related topics