If the human eye can only focus on one object at a time...

...is human object recognition limited to one object at a time, or does the brain recognise objects in areas not being focused on?

For me I do recognise things in the areas I am not focusing on, I wanted to see how it applies to you.

No. You can focus on many things at one time. We all do it everyday.

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If the brain didn't recognise objects in the periphery, then we would spend most of our lives feeling very confused.

Right now I can see my iPod and all the things around me, and I know what they are.

My dad did an experiment on me once because he'd read somewhere that you can't see colours in your peripheral vision unless you already know what colour it is already.

He put felt tip pens by the side of my head about a metre away and told me to guess the colours and I got them all wrong.

Is it not harder for the brain to recognise objects in the peripheral vision as it is much more blurry than the foveal (central) vision?

The brain can recognise objects even with very little information available. Of course, the chance that it will recognise something correctly increases as the amount or quality of that information increases, but objects in the periphery can still be identified to a reasonable extent. (This does vary depending on other factors though, such as a person's familiarity with the scene or the objects involved).

Bump

Do you feel you can accurately recognise using your peripheral vision?

Have there been times when you couldn't recognise something using your peripheral vision, but you recognised it using your foveal (central) vision?

Depends how complex the object is that I'm trying to recognise, I suppose.

Of course. Peripheral vision acuity isn't brill.

Lots of these threads recently. All coming together to get your coursework done? :P

So that means humans can recognise multiple objects at a time?

Why our focus is so limited strikes me though? We can only focus on a single object or single point. So how does in a way aid multiple object recognition, when our focus is on one object or one point?

Lol...

I wouldn't say so. Said my opinion on this quite recently in a v similar thread. I think it depends on the complexity of the object or stimuli - simple ones you can identify quickly and in parallel; but complex ones are resource intensive so you have to do that individually. Finding a different colour spot out of many of the same colour vs Where's Wally, for instance.

The fovea contains all (like 80% ish?) of the cells, so its the point that provides most acuity. So the point of focus is a very small area (thumb width maybe), of which the eye flickers around to improve acuity in the area (saccade and fixation).

My knowledge of the eye isn't brill atm, but that's the gist of what I know.