Out of the corner of my eye

Do our eyes really have corners?
Where did the game "I spy with my little eye" originate?
Origin

The game I Spy originated in the early 20th century. It remains a common pastime played by children - albeit often initiated by adults to occupy bored children on car journeys and the like. One person secretly choose an object that they can 'spy with their little eye' and the others take turns to guess the name of the object.


The game isn't especially old and the first record of it that I can find is in The Winnipeg Free Press, December 1937:


"Other games ... are: What is My Thought Like, I Spy With My Little Eye (children love this) and Bird, Beast, Flower or Fish."


The game spawned a highly successful series of I-SPY spotter's guide books made for British children. These were very popular in the 1950s and 1960s.


The guessing game was preceded by another children's game called I Spy (or Hy Spy). This was a variant of what is now called Hide and Seek and was known in the UK from the 18th century. John Brand refers to it in his


History and antiquities of the town and county of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1789:


"'I spye', is the usual exclamation at a childish game called 'Hie, spy, hie'."
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/192000.html

Why do we notice things out of the corner of our eyes?
When we direct our attention to an object, we usually look directly at it, but research just published in the journal Neuron looks at how we focus our attention on things that we notice ‘out of the corner of our eye’.


A research team, led by David Melcher from Oxford Brookes University, has been investigating this process, known to psychologists as implicit selective attention.


They found when focusing on a certain attribute of visual experience – such as colour, the visual system automatically groups other objects of the same colour that move together, even if they are not directly involved in the task at hand.


They also found that objects are understood by the visual system in different ways, depending on whether the object was the focus of attention, or outside of it.


Objects being focused on were understood as wholes by using the fact that all the visual elements have the same surface, whereas objects outside the current focus were grouped in a more basic way, using the fact that visual elements are close together or move in a similar way.
http://mindhacks.com/2005/06/08/out-of-the-corner-of-my-eye/