In addition, you can view four new examples . This provides a more realistic representation of an actual human retinal configuration. The stationary pattern in the upper left is a schematic of the retina. The line of text at the top shows what Mr. Chips is trying to read. As he identifies words, they appear in italics below his moving retina.
Dots indicate the presence of unrecognized letters.
You are seeing repetitions of a sequence of 10 fixations. Animation by J. Stephen Mansfield Notice the presence of a regression in this sequence, that is a short leftward saccade. To resolve this uncertainty, he has to make a regression to uncover the second letter of the word. Regressions are often considered a mark of poor reading, but this example shows that an Ideal strategy results in regressions. In fact, an ideal observer with a central scotoma makes substantially more regressions than an ideal observer with intact central vision.