Best Of MetaFilter

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? by Bistrosavage (cc by)

The question of what information the visual system gets right before the eye movement is, quite literally, a chapter in my dissertation ...

Mefite Making You Bored For Science has some very interesting observations in the thread on saccadic masking (and other eye/brain illusions) in which we discover our visual systems blatantly lie to us all the time. (Also see Rhaomi's comment about the sci-fi novel that employs saccadic exploitation by space aliens!)

Jumping-Spider,on-fish-hook-eyes_2012-08-02-16.13.51-ZS-PMax by Sam Droege (cc by)

The tough question of what it would be like to have animal eyes as a human got a great answer from member (and brain researcher) wyzewoman:

First, we have to consider the type of animal whose eye we're using. Mice, for instance, have remarkably poor acuity -- the world is a pretty big blur to them -- and I think a lot of that comes from the physical structure of their eyes, so the child would inherit this. However, there are predators with very good acuity, so let's assume we're using eyes from one of those. And of course there's the issue of color; most mammals can sense 2 rather than 3. Our hypothetical child wouldn't be able to get around this limitation.