Jumping and Jittering are in the Eye of the Beholder

Charlie can focus on a single object, or set of objects—like one of those 48 piece jigsaw puzzles—for a long, long time. When he is a big space, whether wide and open or crampt and full of things (as the New York subway last weekend), I’ve noted that his eyes flit all over the place, as if he is trying to settle on something as an anchor in so much stimuli. A study published in the journal Nature suggests that jumpy eye movements can help people process detail much more details in what they see even more efficiently. From a June 14th Science Daily article:

About 50 years ago scientists discovered the small, jittery eye movements keep the retinal image in constant motion and, if that retinal motion ceases, vision fades. But researchers have since debated whether those movements serve any additional purpose.

Now, using a new technique for counteracting the visual effects of the tiny movements, [Michele] Rucci, director of [Boston] university’s Active Perception Laboratory, and his team have shown that without such movements, perception of fine-grained information is reduced.

The finding suggests fixational eye movements are used by the brain to extract fine details of visual information.

Perhaps when Charlie is looking all around him with jittery eyes, he is not exactly not paying attention, but trying to focus on the matter at hand even more.