This experiment examined the effect of nonlinear magnification and foveal loading on the detection of peripheral visual targets. Peripheral objects were scaled using cortical magnification factors, and the foveal task was to determine mirror symmetry for pairs of figures. The results showed that nonlinear magnification had the effect of equating target detection performance at the centre and the periphery. The improved detection performance was present in both with and without foveal loading conditions, with the greatest performance improvement occurring for the farthest peripheral targets. These results suggest the potential usefulness of variable resolution projection displays designed to match the psychophysical properties of the human visual system and reduce the tunnel vision effect found in visual inspection and vigilance tasks in manufacturing industries. However, because of a lateral masking effect, it seems necessary to concurrently magnify the inter-object spacings as well as the object sizes to achieve better overall effectiveness with such variable resolution displays.

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