http://multisenserealism.com/2013/04/25/a-deeper-look-a-peripheral-vision/
[image: image] When peripheral vision is being explained, an image like the one on the right is often used to show how only a small area around our point of focus is in high definition. The periphery is shown to be blurry. While this gets the point across, I think that it actually obscures the deeper nature of perception. If I focus on some quadrant of the image on the left, while it is true that my visual experience of the other quadrants is diminished, it is somehow less available experientially rather than degraded visually. At all times I can clearly tell the difference between the quality of left image and the right blur. If peripheral vision were a blur, I would expect that the unfocused boxes on the left would look more like the one on the right, but it doesn’t. I can see that the periphery of the left image is not especially blurry, even though I can’t count the number of blocks or dots that are there, I can see that the blurry image is completely different. By contrast, if I look directly at any part of the blurry image on the right I can easily count the blurry blobs when I look at them, even through they are quite blurred. What I think this shows are two different types of information entropy – one public and quantitative, and one private and qualitative. Peripheral vision is not a lossy compression in any aesthetic sense. There is an attenuation of optical acuity, but not in a way which diminishes the richness of the visual textures. There is uncertainty but only in a top-down way. We still have a clear picture of the image as a whole, but the parts which we aren’t looking at directly are seen as in a dream – distinct but generic and psychologically slippery. If perception were really driven by bottom up processing exclusively, we should be able to reproduce the effect of peripheral vision in an image literally, but we can’t. The best we can do is present this focused-in-the-center, blurry everywhere else kind of image which figuratively suggests peripheral vision, but it is not the same thing. The capacity to see is more than a detection of optical information, and it is not a projection of a digital simulation (otherwise we would be able to produce it in an image). Seeing is the visual quality of attention, not a quantity of data. It is not only a functional mechanism to acquire data, it is more importantly an aesthetic experience. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
