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This chapter reviews the features of the visual and oculomotor systems that are particularly important for understanding active vision. First, the chapter describes the inhomogeneity of the visual projections and the consequences of the resulting inhomogeneity on visual abilities. Human vision has a high resolution fovea at the centre and visual ability falling off quickly into peripheral vision. Second, the evidence for multiple types of parallel processing within the visual and oculomotor system is reviewed. Third, the basic characteristics of the oculomotor system are described and different types of eye movement are identified, followed by a more detailed description of saccadic eye movements: the fast ballistic eye movements that move the fovea to point at regions of interest.

This chapter focuses on links between serendipity and real politics. It argues that in the real world, the element that historically assures extinction is unidirectionality and tunnel vision, a single-mindedness of process and response in pursuit of a purpose. Survival requires adaptation to constantly changing environments, finding ways to move sideways while maintaining clarity of purpose. The capacities that create the serendipitous moment, the capacity to give birth to discovery and through discovery to give birth to constructive change are discussed. These include acquiring and building a capacity for peripheral vision, developing creative learning disciplines, and sustaining platforms that are smart flexible.

The study in this chapter aims to assess the effects of degraded peripheral vision on visual performance. A series of preliminary psychological experiments were conducted to evaluate identification task performance in unrestricted viewing conditions in terms of the required time to identify a peripherally located three-digit number. This study is inspired by the case of decreased performance and discomfort of patients wearing corrective lenses with distorted peripheral fields. The experiments in the study involve three subjects whose head and eye movements were simultaneously recorded using an infrared reflection technique and an ultrasonic head movement monitor, respectively. A block diagram of a model to represent the task of identifying eccentric targets during restricted peripheral vision is constructed in this chapter. It is concluded that identification of peripheral targets when peripheral vision is restricted requires a coordinated and precise motor response from head and eyes.

At the most general level, this chapter aims to show that Ibn al-Haytham’s Kitāb al-Manāẓir (“Book of Optics”) is best understood as a systematic elaboration on Ptolemy’s Optics according to a replacement of Ptolemy’s visual rays with light-rays. As part of that elaboration, Alhacen provided a more systematic operational account of visual perception according to its stages from brute, physical sensation, through visual discrimination and perception, to conception. This account, moreover, was based implicitly on a psychological model that was fully compatible with Avicenna’s internal senses model of faculty psychology. In addition, Alhacen’s use of ray-geometry to account for reflection and refraction, although still based on Ptolemy, was considerably more sophisticated and rigorous. Altogether, then, Alhacen’s theory of vision marks the perfection of ancient optics, as epitomized in Ptolemy’s Optics, not a revolutionary break with those optics.

This chapter revisits the popular comedies of Mario “Cantinflas” Moreno from the golden age of Mexican cinema and argues that these films are not simply escapist and ideologically suspect but represent peripheral spaces of subversive difference that in their cultural and historical specificity cannot be easily co-opted by a cultural-imperialist center. Cantinflas’s humor is characterized by his linguistic contortionism, or cantinflismo, in which he says plenty without saying anything, a verbal nonsense that sidesteps narrative registers and affords a bodily engagement through laughter that relies on particular cultural codes and learned structures of feeling. This chapter provincializes classical Hollywood cinema by arguing for a peripheral vision modeled on the comedic practice of the relajo, which plays with the classical spatial arrangement of screen and theater space. This chapter examines the comedian’s quick verbal play in addition to formal devices, editing techniques, and doubled narrative structures that “sidestep” on multiple levels.

Moments of disorientation—be they personal, communal, economic, or political—can become opportunities to rethink our habitual ways of being in the world. This chapter presents embodied practices that underscore how disorientation productively shifts our perspective from a focus on visibility and stability to a sensibility energized by proprioception and instability. In addition, it traces the implications of shifting orientations, getting lost, embracing the unforeseen, and moving in between states of knowing and unknowing. The practice of dwelling in the unforeseen requires a tolerance for ambiguity and conjures a state of being that is at once open to the world around us and grounded in our own sensory experience. Certain physical practices can train for a psychic tolerance for chaos, confusion, being off-balance or feeling uncomfortable—paving the way to respond to disorientation with curiosity rather than reacting with fear.

Something....-What? —A phenomenon. Something intrusive, something vague but insistent, pushing itself upon us. — Something outside? From afar? Something alien? — Something descending in the night, standing in the shadows at the foot of the bed. —An illusion? Hallucination maybe? A quirky twist of imagination? — No, definitely a presence, something that might be a someone, a someone with wires and electric sensors, probing, penetrating, exploring private parts. Something lifting us off the familiar face of the planet we thought we knew so well, beaming us outside the orbit of our comfortable homes. Definitely something indefinite . . . or someone. —We hear about them only from others who speak about sightings of unidentified objects in the sky, because we do not allow ourselves to be counted among the unstable few who acknowledge the possibility of something outside the circle of our sciences. Those unstable few accept belief in something standing in the shadows at the door. We listen closely to those speaking about incidents of the phenomenon. We do not look. — Something IS out there. We’ve seen and heard it in the night. It’s contacting us. The phenomenon certainly exists in late-night chat like the above. It exists as metaphysical hearsay, as an internal dialogue between what we believe and what we think we are willing to believe. Popular descriptions of “the incident” waver between child-like awe and tongue-in-cheek tabloid humor. Here is where our knowledge, as a culturally defined certainty, becomes most vulnerable. Here we discover the soft edges of knowledge as an established and culturally underwritten form of belief. What a thrill to feel the tug of war on the thin thread of shared belief! A blend of religious archetypes and science-fiction imagery supplies the words for those who tell about the incident. The stories often float up through hypnosis or “recovered memory” hypnotherapy, as in the famous case of Betty and Barney Hill who experienced abduction one September night in New Hampshire in 1961. Researchers have recently plotted consistently recurring patterns in thousands of stories, and the mythic dimension of the story line has not been lost on Hollywood.

The performance of motor skills is linked with paying attention to the task at hand and/or to relevant cues associated with the environment where the individual/team is performing. This chapter focuses on two major concepts of attention that have been studied extensively in the literature of sport and exercise psychology: attentional instructions (internal and external) and visual attention. It provides an updated overview of the research findings on these two concepts and identifies five questions associated with attention and skilled performance that have the potential to advance theory, methodology, and applied interventions. Among these questions are: Can an internal focus of attention be preferable at times to an external one? What are the neural correlates of attentional and visual processes in sport? What is actually known about the ecological validity of the attentional instructions/visual attention field training?