Abstract: his paper holds a retrospective and global view on several aspects regarding the saccades in the process of visual search, including of its timing process, its nerve mechanism, and related theory and model as well. The research found that most attentions are paid to the endogenous saccades and exogenous saccades. But there are many disagreements in the research of eye movement memory, inhibition of return (IOR) and saccades timing process. As far as the nerve mechanism of saccades is concerned, it’s said that the frontal eye fields (FEF) and superior colliculus (SC) are the sensitive area and instruction senders of saccades respectively. Although different theory and model have different explanations respectively, all these explanations cannot be ideal. As a result, to modify and integrate these theories and propose a new one becomes urgent and necessary. At last, this paper put forward to a direction for future research

Key words: visual search, saccades, timing process, theory and model, nerve mechanism