What is peripheral vision in reading?

It is what you see outside the small, sharp spot your eyes rest on. Sharp vision covers only about a thumb's width at arm's length, and the farther a letter is from that spot, the less of it you can make out (Rayner et al., 2016).

Can you train peripheral vision to read faster?

There is no good evidence for it. In normal reading, the window around each stop is limited by how fast you process language, not by your eyes, and training people to read words flashed further out has not produced faster reading with good comprehension (Rayner et al., 2016).

Can you read a whole line at a glance?

No. You identify words only about 7 letters to the right of where you look and take in 3 to 4 letters to the left, with nothing from the lines above or below (Rayner et al., 2016). Reading a line takes several stops.

Peripheral Vision in Speed Reading: What It Can and Can't Do

What peripheral vision does when you read

Pit words only work if something takes in the words around each stop. The course calls that peripheral vision: what you see outside the spot you are looking at directly. Rest your eyes on one word of this sentence and notice that you can still tell there are words on either side.

Every reader relies on it. Before your eyes jump, the edge of your vision has already given you a preview of the next word. That is why readers skip the next word about 30% of the time, mostly short or predictable ones, and still process most of them (Rayner et al., 2016).

How the course trains it

The course’s drill is a game on a 5×5 grid of the numbers 1 to 25 in random order, known as a Schulte table:

Fix your eyes on the centre of the grid.
Find the numbers in order, 1 to 25, without letting your gaze wander.
Aim for under 30 seconds, and keep at it until that feels comfortable.
Play a few rounds a day, for a while.

The founder calls it simple and, in his view, a lot of fun. The grid is usually credited to the German psychiatrist Walter Schulte, who designed it as a test of attention (HandWiki). For more rounds, other grid sizes and your personal best, use the Schulte table tool.

Then the course moves you on. As your peripheral vision improves, it says, use fewer pit words: one per line on a phone, as few as you can manage in a book.

What the research says

Here the course and the research part ways, and it helps to know where.

Sharp vision is tiny. It covers about a thumb’s width at arm’s length. Hide even one letter in that spot and reading speed halves (Rayner et al., 2016).
The useful window is short and lopsided. You take in 3 to 4 letters to the left of where you look and 14 to 15 to the right, but you can identify words only about 7 letters to the right. Nothing comes from the lines above or below (Rayner et al., 2016).
More than the next word barely helps. When everything beyond the next two words was hidden, readers hardly slowed down (Rayner, 2009).
Language sets the limit, not the eye. Making the letters around a stop bigger did not widen the window, and training people to read words flashed further out did not produce faster reading with good comprehension (Rayner et al., 2016).
The grid is a search task, not a reading one. In the closest controlled test, nine weeks of a similar grid exercise did not improve concentration in 28 college soccer players compared with a control group (Greenlees et al., 2006). A 2026 study found faster times on some word tasks after a different visual-search training, but the result is preliminary and says nothing about comprehension (Carabba et al., 2026).

So there is no good evidence that a Schulte table makes you read faster or widens what you see. If you enjoy it, play it as a short warm-up for keeping your eyes still. Don’t count on it for speed.

Using it on a real page

Your peripheral vision already does useful work. Let it:

Let the next word come to you. It has been previewed before you land, so don’t hunt for it. Short, familiar words can pass without a stop of their own.
Use fewer stops as a pace-setter. The course’s move to fewer pit words still works for setting a rhythm. Just know what is happening: with fewer stops, more words are guessed from context rather than seen.
Let comprehension decide. If you start missing the point, add a stop back. Missed words are the normal cost of fewer stops, not a sign that you are doing it wrong.

At work and in study

Narrow columns such as a phone screen, a slide or a newspaper column suit one stop per line, because the lines are short.
Wide lines in reports and textbooks need more stops.
Dense material with numbers, terms or legal wording needs every stop it takes. Guessing from context is fine for an email thread and risky for a contract.

Try it

Play the Schulte table at the top of this page: keep your eyes on the green dot and tap 1 to 25 in order. Treat your time as a game score, not a reading score. Then read a page with one pit word per line and check whether you still got the point. For a reading result with a comprehension check, take the reading speed test.

Next lesson: getting used to speed: the 5 practice stages.

Peripheral Vision in Speed Reading