Often, 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 defined in high resolution. The periphery is shown to be blurry. While this gets the point across, I think that it actually obscures the subtle nature of perception.

If I focus on some part 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 image. If I focus on a part of the right hand image, the unfocused portion does not blur further into a uniform grey, but retains the suggestion of separate fuzzy units.

If peripheral vision were truly a blur, I would also expect that when focusing on the left hand image, the peripheral boxes would look more like the one on the right, but it doesn’t. I can see that the peripherized blocks of the left image are not especially blurry. No matter how I squint or unfocus or push both images wayy into the periphery of my sight, I can easily tell that the two images are quite different. I can’t resolve detail, but I can see that there is potentially detail to be resolved. If I look directly at any part of the blurry image on the right I can easily count the fuzzies when I look at them, even through they are blurred. By contrast, with the image on the left, I can’t count the number of blocks or dots that are there even though I can see that they are block-like. 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.

What I think this shows that there are two different types of information-related entropy and two different categories of physics – one public and quantitative, and one private and qualitative or aesthetic. Peripheral vision is not a lossy compression in any aesthetic sense. 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 suggests peripheral vision figuratively, but the aesthetic quality of the peripheral experience cannot be represented.

I suggest that 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 the experience literally 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.