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Information Visualisation |
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News E-zineEvents See the contents of theInformation Visualization Journal by Palgrave Publishing |
Inf@Vis!
Most of us, when looking at our environment, have the sensation that we are seeing everything sharply. One could say the we perceive our environment in its entirety, that we see everything at once. This illusion is far from reality as we can see by just taking into account that we need to read a book by looking at each word one by one. To see this better you just need to do a simple exercise: stare at the first word of the next paragraph (ACTIVE) and, still looking at that word, try to read the other one at the other end of the page.
Surprised? Effectively, it's not possible to read the word on the right while we are staring at the one on the left. This is due to the fact that the fovea occupies a tiny area of the retina (a circle of 0.2 mm of diameter) covering only 1% of its surface that, nevertheless, is directly connected to 50% of the visual cortex. The fovea contains a high density of photoreceptors and is responsible fot sharp vision. On the other hand the peripheral retina (the remains of it) with 99% of the surface connects only to the remaining 50% of the visual cortex, integrating the signals of many individual cells into a limited number of neural fibers. The result is a high visual acuity zone just in the center of the retina (the fovea) and a large peripheral vision area with very low resolution but very sensitive to movement and spatial location.... |
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