Unfortunately your example is inapt because the center of your vision and your peripheral vision may as well be entirely separate systems that don't overlap, an

Unfortunately your example is inapt because the center of your vision and your peripheral vision may as well be entirely separate systems that don't overlap, and the way brains apply focus doesn't translate to how cameras work. Your scenario is closer to asking about the center of your focus saying the path in front of you is clear and your peripheral vision detecting inbound motion from the side. Peripheral motion detection overrides the clear forward view, but it's because they aren't trying to record the same information. Here's why: > If your eyes tells you the floor is safe, and your nose smells something bad, do you stop? Absolutely, yes, if the bad smell smells like dog shit or vomit or something else that I definitely don't want to step in. If I'm walking, I'm very unlikely to be looking directly at my feet and much more likely to be looking ahead to do predictive path planning. I definitely do stop at least transiently in your scenario and then apply extra visual focus to the ground right in front of my feet so that I don't step on dog shit. The center of my vision is great at discerning details, but peripheral vision is terrible for that. Anyway, the obvious answer to your inquiry based on my explanation here is to use confidence weighting and adaptive focus. If I think something might be happening somewhere, I focus my available resources directly at the problem.