While I’m talking about visual acuity.
IDK how this works in other animals, but in humans, our visual acuity is strongest in the center of our focus and weaker in our peripheral vision right?
Except for our night vision.
The reason for this is that, we have rods and cones in our eyes. You might’ve heard that before. Cones are what we use to see in lit areas, we have 3 different types that are sensitive to different wavelengths, which is how we see color. (For all u computer artists out there, think channels. U got red, blue, and green right? And you can separate them and just work on them each in a monochrome scale. But when u put them together u get a whole spectrum. It’s kinda like that.)
We have a whole ton of them in the center of our eyes so we can see details where we focus our eyes. Then they’re more spread out in the rest of our eyes for our peripheral vision. Our peripheral vision is fairly good at picking up movement, and decent with edge-detection. But not so good at seeing detail.
Cones are not as light-sensitive as rods. They’re extremely good for seeing in well-lit conditions but they don’t pick up much in the dark at all. When it gets dark our eyes switch to relying on rods because they are more sensitive and pick up low levels of light our cones wouldn’t notice at all.
We have just one kind of rod (It’s why things seem way less colorful when you’re seeing in the dark. It’s like only having one channel.) and we don’t have many in the center of our eyes cuz there’s no room with all those cones there! But we do have way more rods in our peripheral vision.
Which means, our night vision is better and has more acuity in our peripheral vision than it does in the center of our focus.
If you ever saw something at night in the corner of your eye that seemed to disappear when you looked right at it, that might have been the reason. Cuz when you look right at it, you’re actually getting less visual information from it.
IDK what u should do with all of this information but it interests me and I thought I should share.
