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How natural and artificial vision systems learn and develop depends on how they sample information from their environment. Humans actively do so through saccadic eye movements. The statistics of saccade amplitudes have been well-characterized in tightly controlled contexts such as viewing images on a computer screen. However, the degree to which such findings generalize to real-world contexts involving moving agents and objects is currently unknown. Here, we first analyze saccade amplitude statistics of both infants and adults during naturalistic free play. We find that these differ significantly from those previously reported for head-fixed picture viewing, with a relatively smaller/greater abundance of medium/large saccades. Next, we present a computational model that explains saccade amplitude statistics based on the foveated nature of vision and the associated space-variant magnification of different …