Humans and other primates sample the visual environment using saccadic eye movements that shift a high-resolution fovea towards regions of interest to create a clear perception of a scene across fixations. Many mammals, however, like mice, lack a fovea, which raises the question of why they make saccades. Here, we describe and test the hypothesis that saccades work with the adaptive properties of neural networks. Specifically, we determined the minimum amplitude of saccades in natural scenes necessary to provide uncorrelated inputs to model neural populations for a wide range of receptive field (RF) sizes. This analysis predicts the distributions of observed saccade sizes during passive viewing for non-human primates, cats, and mice. Furthermore, disrupting the development of RF properties by monocular deprivation changes saccade sizes consistent with this hypothesis. Therefore, natural scene statistics and the neural representation of natural images appear to be critical factors guiding saccadic eye movements.
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