How come we can focus on our peripheral vision without moving our pupil? (For example, during visual exams at the doctor or cheating on a written exam without getting caught)
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It’s because you have [retina](https://nkcf.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/human-eye-diagram.jpg) (the light-sensing part of the eye) all around the inside of the eye. So images that enter your eye from a sideways or up/down direction still fall on some portion of your retina and get “detected” (seen).
The images are blurry. The images that you focus on are NOT blurry because the “macula” part of the retina is extra-super-sensitive, basically much higher resolution than the rest of the retina.
A lot of animals have really good vision over their entire retina. Horses for example, they don’t need to move their eyes much; they can focus on things ahead of them, to the side, or behind them with just their mind (just their brain refocuses what it pays attention to). You can tell what a horse is looking at not by their eyes, but because they point their ears at it (they try to focus on the sound of it too). We have directional eyes and “all around” ears, horses have “all around” eyes and directional ears.
We can’t. We can pay attention to it with a little concentration (pilots are trained to do this while flying at night to detect other aircraft), but the structure of the eye makes it so that we literally cannot focus on the periphery. Outside of the fovea (the clear, focused, central part of your visual field), the eye can only really detect motion (probably for threat detection purposes) and well-known structures and forms.
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