Summary
Peripheral vision, or indirect vision, is vision as it occurs outside the point of fixation, i.e. away from the center of gaze or, when viewed at large angles, in (or out of) the "corner of one's eye". The vast majority of the area in the visual field is included in the notion of peripheral vision. "Far peripheral" vision refers to the area at the edges of the visual field, "mid-peripheral" vision refers to medium eccentricities, and "near-peripheral", sometimes referred to as "para-central" vision, exists adjacent to the center of gaze. The inner boundaries of peripheral vision can be defined in any of several ways depending on the context. In everyday language the term "peripheral vision" is often used to refer to what in technical usage would be called "far peripheral vision." This is vision outside of the range of stereoscopic vision. It can be conceived as bounded at the center by a circle 60° in radius or 120° in diameter, centered around the fixation point, i.e., the point at which one's gaze is directed. However, in common usage, peripheral vision may also refer to the area outside a circle 30° in radius or 60° in diameter. In vision-related fields such as physiology, ophthalmology, optometry, or vision science in general, the inner boundaries of peripheral vision are defined more narrowly in terms of one of several anatomical regions of the central retina, in particular the fovea and the macula. The fovea is a cone-shaped depression in the central retina measuring 1.5 mm in diameter, corresponding to 5° of the visual field. The outer boundaries of the fovea are visible under a microscope, or with microscopic imaging technology such as OCT or microscopic MRI. When viewed through the pupil, as in an eye exam (using an ophthalmoscope or retinal photography), only the central portion of the fovea may be visible. Anatomists refer to this as the clinical fovea, and say that it corresponds to the anatomical foveola, a structure with a diameter of 0.35 mm corresponding to 1 degree of the visual field.
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