How saccades affect our vision: New study reveals surprising findings!

How saccades affect our vision: New study reveals surprising findings!

On May 27, 2025, a groundbreaking study by Prof. Dr. Martin Rolfs and his research team at the Science of Intelligence Cluster of Excellence at the Technical University of Berlin. This study, published in the renowned journal Nature Communications, is dedicated to the complex relationship between body movements, particularly saccades, and visual perception.

Research shows that visual stimuli can become invisible when they move at speeds, durations and distances consistent with typical human saccades. Saccades are rapid, jerky backward movements of the eyes that usually occur two to three times per second. Interestingly, humans do not perceive the associated visual shifts, which makes the mechanisms of perception and vision particularly complex.

Mechanisms of visual perception

According to the study, the speed of saccades could predict the speed limit of vision. People who make faster saccades can see objects moving faster. This could be particularly true for athletes, such as baseball players or action video game players, who must deal with increased movements in their field of vision.

The saccades also create specific movement patterns on the retina that occur in the observer's subconscious. Prof. Rolfs emphasizes the need for interdisciplinary collaboration between motor and perception research in order to better understand these phenomena. The results of the study suggest that the visual system filters movements that are similar to one's own eye movements and classifies them as irrelevant, which explains the visual blurriness during eye movements.

The phenomenon of saccades

To define saccades more precisely, they are jerky movements of the eyes that occur when the eye moves from one fixated object to another. This happens, for example, in everyday life when you fixate on a house passing by while taking a train and your eyes snap in the direction of travel to capture a new point of view. These movements are central to both eye movements and the peripheral nervous system.

During a saccade, visual perception is severely limited, meaning people can only take in limited information at that moment. Clinical testing of saccades involves deliberately fixating objects at intervals, assessing the speed and accuracy of eye movements.

Pathological saccades can be divided into several categories, including slowed and hypometric saccades, which often occur in neurodegenerative diseases. Hypermetric saccades, on the other hand, which occur in cerebellar lesions, are also an important field of investigation in neurological diagnostics.

The research of Prof. Rolfs and his team not only opens up new perspectives for the psychology of perception, but also for clinical applications in the diagnosis of visual and movement disorders. Overall, the study highlights how important it is to consider the mechanisms of vision and body perception in conjunction in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of human perception.