MC's field of awareness

GreenRoom · Apr 15, 2008

I'm not sure if this is the right thread for this, but I'm having a problem figuring out how much my MC would realistically know in the following generalized situation.

Say you see someone out of the corner of your eye, but you never look at them, how much would you recall of that person? – imagine your both on the same line, facing forward, but the one seeing out of the corner of their eye is crouching rather than standing.

Maybe a clearer way to phrase it: You are crouching with your back to a wall. A door in that wall opens ten feet to the right of you. Someone steps out and stops. This would make them inline with you, back to the same wall. You never stop looking straight forward, stay in place less than a second, then run to your left. How much do you realistically see/notice/pick up about this person? What would be to little? What would be too much?

-Greenroom

Elliot Cowan · Apr 15, 2008

Geez, Louise that's a complex question.
Are you asking how much detail of an individual you can pick up in your peripheral vision?
If you are trained to, quite a lot actually.
Otherwise not much at all.
You'd possibly have a sense of what they were wearing and their hair and skin colour but not much else.

lfraser · Apr 15, 2008

I think you'd see movement and not much else.

TheIT · Apr 15, 2008

I'd suggest finding a friend and a doorway and acting it out. Going through the physical exercise might give you more ideas.

Shweta · Apr 16, 2008

You probably won't have a good idea of real peripheral vision, because your eyes will saccade to that location & back. So you think you see more with peripheral vision than you really do.

We don't see color with peripheral vision, and we don't see detailed shape. With real peripheral vision you get a sense of a blob and whether/where it's moving. Our peripheral vision is mostly rods. Motion-sensitive, low-light sensitive and no color vision.
But almost everything we do see, including our illusion of seeing a clear world around us, is because our eyes are constantly moving, much faster than we are consciously aware of.

You can see this in change blindness studies, like the demos here:
http://www.vanderveer.org.nz/research/labs/eyelab/changeblindness/index.php
http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/ECS/kayakflick.gif
http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/23.html

Course, most people don't know this. What your character sees out of their "peripheral vision" will depend on how good they are at subconscious attention/eye movement and picking up information from that.

Phaeal · Apr 16, 2008

As TheIt suggests, act out the scene.

allenparker · Apr 16, 2008

Agree with Shweta

In that scenario, the natural tendency to look in the direction of noise would take over. You would look and see the person. This is part of our natural defense coding in our brains.

WittyandorIronic · Apr 16, 2008

Shweta said:
You probably won't have a good idea of real peripheral vision, because your eyes will saccade to that location & back. So you think you see more with peripheral vision than you really do.

We don't see color with peripheral vision, and we don't see detailed shape. With real peripheral vision you get a sense of a blob and whether/where it's moving. Our peripheral vision is mostly rods. Motion-sensitive, low-light sensitive and no color vision.
But almost everything we do see, including our illusion of seeing a clear world around us, is because our eyes are constantly moving, much faster than we are consciously aware of.

You can see this in change blindness studies, like the demos here:
http://www.vanderveer.org.nz/research/labs/eyelab/changeblindness/index.php
http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/ECS/kayakflick.gif
http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/23.html

Course, most people don't know this. What your character sees out of their "peripheral vision" will depend on how good they are at subconscious attention/eye movement and picking up information from that.

All I can say is wow...
The collective knowledge (or at the very least the knowledge of where to find the knowledge) of AW sometimes astounds me.

Shweta · Apr 16, 2008

WittyandorIronic said:
All I can say is wow...
The collective knowledge (or at the very least the knowledge of where to find the knowledge) of AW sometimes astounds me.

I claim specialization in "weird funny things our brains do"

Speaking of which, if you want something amusing, go here and watch the video, counting how many times the ball gets passed from one person to another.

Then watch it again without trying to do anything in particular.

It's worth it.
then ask me about the door.

WittyandorIronic · Apr 16, 2008

Shweta said:
Speaking of which, if you want something amusing, go here and watch the video, counting how many times the ball gets passed from one person to another.

Then watch it again without trying to do anything in particular.

It's worth it.
then ask me about the door.

OMG!! lol. that totally got me. lol.

RJK · Apr 16, 2008

Thanks Shweta, for that information. There's another factor that comes into play. Has your MC been in that room before? if he has been in the room, his right brain will have registered the spacial coordinates of the room and its contents. The person would register as being out of place and he would automatically look to see what the new article was.
If this is the first time in the room, it would depend on the circumstances. Is he on guard? If so, he will check the entire room before proceding.

WittyandorIronic · Apr 16, 2008

Sooo...weirdly, I just checked my email ( about 9 minutes after my last post) and an email about "cognitive biases" and a link to this http://www.dothetest.co.uk/ were in it. hmmmm... I wonder if the universe is trying to tell me something.

Zelenka · Apr 16, 2008

Shweta said:
I claim specialization in "weird funny things our brains do"

Speaking of which, if you want something amusing, go here and watch the video, counting how many times the ball gets passed from one person to another.

Then watch it again without trying to do anything in particular.

It's worth it.
then ask me about the door.

I think I missed the point of the video. I didn't notice any difference whether I was counting the passes or not

ETA, having seen the link WaoI posted, I get it now, but I saw it whilst counting. Maybe that's because my job involves watching about four monitors at once and controlling a text-scroller at the same time.

WittyandorIronic · Apr 16, 2008

The video I linked has a few more instructions, but I don't know if it will have the same impact if you have already completed the former. I think it is sort of a one time trick... unless you have immediate amnesia. lol.

Shweta · Apr 16, 2008

No, if you can make yourself follow the directions, it seems to work for every new video of the type.

ETA: Well, not for Jess' problem. Jess, you're clearly too attentive

ishtar'sgate · Apr 16, 2008

GreenRoom said:
Maybe a clearer way to phrase it: You are crouching with your back to a wall. A door in that wall opens ten feet to the right of you. Someone steps out and stops. This would make them inline with you, back to the same wall. You never stop looking straight forward, stay in place less than a second, then run to your left. How much do you realistically see/notice/pick up about this person? What would be to little? What would be too much?
-Greenroom

O-o-o, fun exercise! I've tried it and I think I'd notice height, sex (unless covered in some sort of generic clothing), color of clothes, approximate weight and build, probably the hand on my side if there's something unique about it like size, deformity, tattoo or jewelry. It's amazing how much you register from the corner of your eye. Probably the most noticeable thing would be their hand because if I'm crouched and they're standing then their hand would be more or less directly beside my face. I don't know what kind of story you're telling but I think if I wanted my MC to recognize this character again I'd make something memorable about his hand. But it really depends upon the MC. Some people have remarkable periferal vision, some have lousy eyesight. I have a friend who is a sharpshooter and can hit an accurate target that I can't even see!
Linnea

David I · Apr 16, 2008

People are drawn to things out of the ordinary. So how much you notice depends strongly on context, expectations...

If you need something to be noticed, it's easy to manipulate the situation so that it's notcied--especially when the character doing the noticing is the POV character. If you're in the POV character's head, you can structure it so that they notice anything you like.

Don't worry about feasibility. Make it feasible.

MC's field of awareness

GreenRoom

brain in a vat

Elliot Cowan

Publish Me

lfraser

Bored and Frantic

TheIT

Infuriatingly Theoretical

Shweta

gone

Phaeal

Whatever I did, I didn't do it.

allenparker

Naked Futon Guy

WittyandorIronic

Shweta

gone

WittyandorIronic

RJK

Sheriff Bullwinkle the Poet says:

WittyandorIronic

Zelenka

Going home!

WittyandorIronic

Shweta

gone

ishtar'sgate

living in the past

David I