How Does Peripheral Vision Feel Rich? A Selective Review.

Human vision is profoundly non-uniform. Spatial resolution, contrast sensitivity, colour discrimination decrease, and the appearance of visual features become increasingly distorted with retinal eccentricity, yet visual experience appears remarkably rich and stable across the entire visual field. This apparent paradox has been a central challenge in vision science: how can a perceptually rich world emerge from a sensory system that samples only a small fraction of the environment with high precision? We argue that cognitive biases alone may be insufficient to explain the apparent richness of peripheral vision and review evidence suggesting that perceptual processes may also contribute. Information sampled in central vision can be extrapolated to peripheral appearance, while prior knowledge and learned regularities allow the visual system to infer missing or distorted peripheral information. These processes operate within the constraints of active vision, where eye movements selectively sample task-relevant information rather than building a complete detailed representation of the scene. We propose that the interaction between centre-to-periphery extrapolation and learned predictions may contribute to rich peripheral experience, specially where we direct attention, allowing the visual system to maintain a coherent and useful representation of the world.