Cite as:
Wade N J, Tatler B W, Heller D, 2003, "Dodge-ing the issue: Dodge, Javal, Hering, and the measurement of saccades in eye-movement research" Perception 32(7) 793 – 804
Download citation data in RIS format

Dodge-ing the issue: Dodge, Javal, Hering, and the measurement of saccades in eye-movement research

Nicholas J Wade, Benjamin W Tatler, Dieter Heller

Received 14 October 2002, in revised form 14 March 2003

Abstract. Dodge, in 1916, suggested that the French term 'saccade' should be used for describing the rapid movements of the eyes that occur while reading. Previously he had referred to these as type I movements. Javal had used the term `saccade' in 1879, when describing experiments conducted in his laboratory by Lamare. Accordingly, Javal has been rightly credited with assigning the term to rapid eye movements. In English these rapid rotations had been called jerks, and they had been observed and measured before Lamare's studies of reading. Rapid sweeps of the eyes occur as one phase of nystagmus; they were observed by Wells in 1792 who used an afterimage technique, and they were illustrated by Crum Brown in 1878. Afterimages were used in nineteenth-century research on eye movements and eye position; they were also employed by Hering in 1879, to ascertain how the eyes moved during reading. In the previous year, Javal had employed afterimages in his investigations of reading, but this was to demonstrate that the eyes moved horizontally rather than vertically. Hering's and Lamare's auditory method established the discontinuous nature of eye movements during reading, and the photographic methods introduced by Dodge and others in the early twentieth century enabled their characteristics to be determined with greater accuracy.

Restricted material:

 Full-text PDF size: 378 Kb

 References  46 references, 13 with DOI links ()

Your computer (IP address: 67.202.9.192) has not been recognised as being on a network authorised to view the full text or references of this article. If you are a member of a university library that has a subscription to the journal, please contact your serials librarian (subscriptions information).