New statistical model of vision

The human retina is made up of approximately 100 million light sensitive cells. This is enough to overload all neurons in the brain. So, people believed that the brain somehow reduced this information overload - by interpreting things in terms of horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines. Then, combining these lines and edges into objects that could be recognized.

But recently, Ruth Rosenholtz put forward a model that this happens only near the center of the retina. At the periphery, things a quite different. The brain does not interpret signals from the periphery as good as the center - a phenomenon you can feel physically (there's a test at the bottom link).

Earlier, this was just a side comment. There wasn't any mathematical model to account for this peculiarity. This new model of vision is converting that into numbers and calculations!

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