saccade
- noun
- /səˈkɑːd/
- Specialized
:
sacada
- The eye of a normally sighted, competent reader does not track along the line but moves in short jumps, or saccades, fixating briefly on small groups of characters then jumping to a new location.
- saccades and fixations
- short saccades
- incoming saccades
Examples
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As she read quickly, her eyes made rapid saccades, jumping from one line to the next.
-
During reading, our eyes move in a series of jumps or saccades, between which there are pauses, or fixations, during which the visual information needed to begin linguistic processing is extracted from the text.
Academic text (2013) -
Because vision is suppressed during a saccade, readers are generally not aware of the change.
Academic text (2013) -
During the lecture, the audience's eyes exhibited frequent saccades as they shifted focus between the speaker and their notes.
-
The experiment showed that participants' eyes performed saccades when trying to find specific details in the text.
Antonyms
How Big
Surface Forms
Etymology
Saccade comes from a French word for 'a jerk' and from the Latin saccus meaning 'sack', like the English word sack, so picture a sack being yanked suddenly to make a sharp movement. That's why a saccade is the quick, jerky movement your eye makes when it jumps from one point to another.