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Some aspects of sight are not affected by mental overload, according to a new research. 

The research suggested that even as we're processing million things at once, we are still sensitive to certain kinds of changes in our visual environment. 

The study further noted that we can automatically detect changes in blur across our field of view. 

For further investigation, researchers focused on the common problem of the blurred sight which can be caused by factors like changes in distance between objects and vision disorders like near-sightedness or far-sightedness. 

Blur is normally compensated for by adjusting the lens of the eye to bring the image back into focus," said study co-author Aaron Johnson, a professor in the Department of Psychology at Concordia, in the press release. 

"We wanted to know if the detection of this blur by the brain happens automatically, because previous research had resulted in two conflicting views."

The views are: 

1.  By focusing your attention on a blurry object in your peripheral vision, you can bring the object into focus - as though you were focusing a camera manually.

2. Blur-detection is automatic: When the brain encounters blurred vision, it automatically compensates - as though you were using a camera with a permanent autofocus function.

"If blur is detected automatically and doesn't require attention, then performing another cognitive task  - driving, say - at the same time shouldn't change our ability to detect the blur," Johnson said in the press release. 

"Our study proves that, much like other simple visual features such as color and size, blur in an image doesn't seem to require mental effort to detect. The process may be what we call 'pre-attentive' - that is, little or no attention is required to detect it. As such, this research provides insight into a key task, compensating for blur, that the visual system must perform on a daily basis. In the future, I hope to study how blur detection changes with age."

The research has been published in the journal Visual Cognition.