Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

aggasalk t1_iwwk6lt wrote

> Everything else outside of the fovea is "blurry" and much less colored. You mind fills in the blanks and you end up perceiving the world as clear an detailed.

I'm sorry, but you have hit a nerve... This stuff is not really true. It gets repeated over and over again (including, sadly, in undergrad psych and even perception classes...), but.. peripheral vision supports color vision just as well as foveal vision (in fact, better in some ways: there are no S-cones in the fovea!).

And "blur" is a very vague term here. Peripheral vision has lower resolution. But it has a precise resolution, and you see things at that resolution, exactly as you do foveally. But we don't say foveal vision is "blurry", even though it has limited resolution just as the periphery does.

You can see smaller details foveally than you can see peripherally, that's the right way to think of it. But things can appear sharp (or blurry) in fovea or periphery.

e.g. see:

http://anstislab.ucsd.edu/files/2012/11/1998-Peripheral-acuity.pdf

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2041669515613671

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82257353.pdf

https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2021/1/niab006/6290438

10

jsshouldbeworking t1_iwxsfal wrote

Thank you for the references! It's good to have more precise ways of talking about the drop in acuity.

Yes, "blurry" is a vague term. To do all of vision in 2 paragraphs, some things get glossed over.

Sorry I hit an optic nerve. ;-)

1