Eli5: when looking around a room your eyes jump from point to point, but when following a moving object they move smoothly. Why can’t they move smoothly when scanning a room?

Question

Eli5: when looking around a room your eyes jump from point to point, but when following a moving object they move smoothly. Why can’t they move smoothly when scanning a room?

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Answer 1

You basically can do two thing: focus on a point and switching focus.

To be able to focus on a point your brain needs to compensate many environmental factors, like the movement of your head or the movement of the object itself, the distance, the brightness, color temperature, etc.

So following an object is not that different compared to staring at a fixed object.