The Eye: Fixations and Saccades

Reading along with speech is the most common form of communication known to man kind.

The human interprets text based reading by a series of fixations and saccades. Fixation is the action of concentrating the eyes directly on a subject and a saccade can be defined as rapid movement of the eye between fixation points. A series of fixations and sacades are otherwise known as ‘scan paths’.

The eye absorbs the majority of necessary information during the fixation process not a saccade. The central point of fixation is key in absorbing information with only a miniscule amount of information being interpreted using the peripheral vision.