Why you can't trust peripheral vision ...yours other the other guy

You do need to head swivel...and one more reason to be moving a bit faster than traffic as we do track movement well...even peripherally. If you are static in the other guys peripheral vision ...you disappear.

Look at this image. You will see black dots pop up at various intersections. You might see a few of them at once. You will almost certainly not see all 12 at once, thanks to our eyes being relatively bad at peripheral vision, thanks to a phenomenon called lateral inhibition. Instead, you'll see the dot in the center of your vision, along with some of the adjacent dots.

If you can see all 12 dots at once, you should go ahead and put that on your resumé.

Click to expand...

couldnt have said it better

The picture on post #1 is not about peripheral vision, since you are looking right at the picture. It's about a blind spot in the eye where the optic nerve connects.

The lesson is the same, though. You have to rotate your head back and forth esp. if you are only looking with one eye (e.g. if your nose blocks the other eye).

Click on the image ....at full size it has to be scanned.
Look up fovea and parafovea.

that is one spacey chart. its freaking me out! dang, now I poked myself in the eye with a fork. better back off on the mm.

lmao

pretty cool.

sort of along the lines of this video for Motion induced blindness. This kid of explains the SMIDSY effect in part

[video]https://youtu.be/Hfrb94mKCJw[/video]

A little extreme but good point none the less. Trippy image. If you stare at the junction between the dots you can see two or three at a time.

I just make sure I have a good strong cup of joe before my ride... LoL...

johnp said:

The picture on post #1 is not about peripheral vision, since you are looking right at the picture. It's about a blind spot in the eye where the optic nerve connects.

The lesson is the same, though. You have to rotate your head back and forth esp. if you are only looking with one eye (e.g. if your nose blocks the other eye).

Click to expand...

It always freaks people out when you prove to them they have a blind spot. Mind you, there are two eyes at work here so not sure how that pans out.

MacDoc said:

You do need to head swivel.

Click to expand...

Just to play devils advocate...you simply need to move your eyes, not your whole head.

Secondly, this really is less to do with peripheral vision and more to do with how your eyeballs work. Rods and cones - here's a good write up that explains it. Read the section about averted vision.

http://oneminuteastronomer.com/astro-course-day-5/

The writeup at the top actually mentions lateral inhibition as being part of the illusion, which it is. But that has nothing to do with peripheral vision.

You can experience a very simiiar thing to this image by going outside at night in a very dark location, laying on the ground with your eyes closed for around 5 minutes with NO light sources, and then open your eyes. Look at the stars in the centre of your field of vision, then move your eyes slightly and suddenly you'll see a ton MORE stars where you were just looking and concentrating at moments before. Those stars were there all along, it's just that with how your eyeballs work you couldn't see them when you were staring directly at them, but stare slightly to their side and boom, there they are. Move back and they seemingly disappear again. It's really quite a neat experience if you have access to a place dark enough to experience it.

Much like how all the dots are actually there in the above image but you just can't see them all at the same time because of how your eyes work, the stars are of course always there but you just can't see them all at once for the same reason.

Sorry to nitpick, but this was a topic of conversation at ground school when I got my pilots licence. I don't remember why, but I do remember it drifting into the conversation about rods and cones and how important maintaining careful light control in the cockpit during night flight - even a split second of bright light can destroy a pilots night vision for up to 10 minutes, hence why laser strikes are such a big deal to pilots.