Saccade-Like Motion Disappears From Awareness

Objects moving at speeds, durations, and distances similar to those of our rapid eye movements (saccades) can become invisible to us, even when our eyes are still, and people with faster saccadic eye movements can perceive faster-moving objects better than those with slower ones. In a 2025 study, researchers showed that motion matching the timing and path of saccades can slip past awareness, revealing that our visual system partly "subtracts out" saccade-like motion and that individual differences in saccade speed set a limit on how well we see very fast-moving targets.

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