UCL researchers take a sideways look at peripheral vision

Researchers from UCL?s Institute of Ophthalmology say what we can and can?t see in our peripheral vision may not be the result of a random process. As you read this, you may notice that the word directly in front of you is clear, but all the surrounding words are hard to decipher. For most people, this effect ? known as ?crowding? ? is not a problem. However, for the millions worldwide who have lost their central vision through eye disease such as macular degeneration, it can make everyday tasks such as reading or recognising friends a challenge. Crowding affects more than 95 per cent of the visual field, but we know very little about how it occurs, aside from the fact that it happens not in the eye, but in parts of the brain that deal with seeing. With far fewer neurons processing inputs from the peripheral visual field compared to our central vision, the brain simplifies these areas to represent more efficiently what is in front of us. Researchers had previously assumed that crowding makes us worse at recognising things by making our peripheral vision more random.