Abstract
On average our eyes make 3–5 saccadic movements per second when we read, although their neural mechanism is still unclear. It is generally thought that saccades help redirect the retinal fovea to specific characters and words but that actual discrimination of information only occurs during periods of fixation. Indeed, it has been proposed that there is active and selective suppression of information processing during saccades to avoid experience of blurring due to the high-speed movement. Here, using a paradigm where a string of either lexical (Chinese) or non-lexical (alphabetic) characters are triggered by saccadic eye movements, we show that subjects can discriminate both while making saccadic eye movement. Moreover, discrimination accuracy is significantly better for characters scanned during the saccadic movement to a fixation point than those not scanned beyond it. Our results showed that character information can be processed during the saccade, therefore saccades during reading not only function to redirect the fovea to fixate the next character or word but allow pre-processing of information from the ones adjacent to the fixation locations to help target the next most salient one. In this way saccades can not only promote continuity in reading words but also actively facilitate reading comprehension.
Highlights
While reading this paper, you are continually making ballistic, saccadic eye movements, which serve to bring a new region of text into foveal vision for detailed analysis
Discrimination of Chinese and alphabetic characters during saccadic eye movement The discrimination performances for Chinese characters during saccadic movement execution are shown in Fig. 2A–C (Second column) and were significantly above chance for the 5 characters nearest the fixation point scanned by the saccade and the 3 characters after the fixation point not scanned by the saccade
Since all these experiments were conducted with meaningful sentences, the semantic relationship between words or sentences may contribute to information processing or text comprehension and be confused with the effects of saccades
Summary
You are continually making ballistic, saccadic eye movements, which serve to bring a new region of text into foveal vision for detailed analysis. Every saccade is associated with a transient but high speed displacement of the retinal image. A large number of studies have shown that visual stimuli presented just before and during saccades are not perceived [1,2,3]. This reduced visual performance is attributed to so called saccadic suppression or saccadic omission, which results in us being unaware of any blurring of viewed images during perception and maintaining visual stability. There may be saccadic compression of both spatial and temporal aspects of visual processing [6,7,8]. The neural mechanism of saccadic suppression and compression is still not very clear
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