The topic of saccades really interests me because it is something I am constantly doing without necessarily noticing. Saccades are eye movements that can be both voluntary and involuntary, where the eyes rapidly change fixation from one object to another. This is the eyes ways of scanning the visual field. When reading, we make saccades to help bring the text into our fovea.If the print was not in our fixation, visual crowding would occur.  It is crazy to me that our eyes are doing saccades for about a quarter of a second and about seven to nine letter spaces, and yet we don’t notice anything going on in our eyes. When we read, it all feels so natural, but our eyes are in fact making constant movements. While information processing doesn’t occur during the saccades, it actually occurs during the fixations. I think it is really fascinating how the processing through our eyes occurs so fast that if a word only remained on a screen for fifty milliseconds after fixation first takes place, reading would be normal.  Saccades are also used when viewing any scene, and our place of fixation is not random. When looking at figure 8.17 in the textbook, of the little girl, I noticed that my eyes focused more on the areas of her eyes, and nose. This makes sense for most people, because we focus on more interesting places in an image. Our eyes respond more to contours as opposed to featureless parts.  When looking at images, our mind just tells our eyes to do certain things, move certain ways, and look at certain parts. All of our eye movements, especially saccades, are important in helping us view our world in every day life.

Wolfe, Jeremy M..Sensation & perception. Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer Associates, 2006. Print