The contributions of central versus peripheral vision to scene gist recognition

Abstract

Which region of the visual field is most useful for recognizing scene gist, central vision (the fovea and parafovea) based on its higher visual resolution and importance for object recognition, or the periphery, based on resolving lower spatial frequencies useful for scene gist recognition, and its large extent? Scenes were presented in two experimental conditions: a "Window," a circular region showing the central portion of a scene, and blocking peripheral information, or a "Scotoma," which blocks out the central portion of a scene and shows only the periphery. Results indicated the periphery was more useful than central vision for maximal performance (i.e., equal to seeing the entire image). Nevertheless, central vision was more efficient for scene gist recognition than the periphery on a per-pixel basis. A critical radius of 7.4 degrees was found where the Window and Scotoma performance curves crossed, producing equal performance. This value was compared to predicted critical radii from cortical magnification functions on the assumption that equal V1 activation would produce equal performance. However, these predictions were systematically smaller than the empirical critical radius, suggesting that the utility of central vision for gist recognition is less than predicted by V1 cortical magnification.

Object and Scene Recognition Impairments in Patients with Macular Degeneration

“…The results indicate that scene gist recognition can be accomplished with low resolution peripheral vision as patients with central vision loss were able to recognize scenes with high accuracy in two types of categorization : natural vs urban scenes and indoor vs outdoor scenes. The results therefore confirm Larson and Loschky's (2009) data with artificial scotomas in normally sighted people, and extend them to real scotomas varying from 5° to 30° eccentricity in our patients. The head was not fixed in our study.…”

“…We examined whether scene gist recognition can be accomplished by low resolution peripheral vision in people with central vision loss. The question of the contribution of central versus peripheral vision on scene gist recognition has been addressed by Larson and Loschky (2009) in normally sighted observers. They presented participants with photographs of real world scenes (27 X 27° of visual angle) for 106 ms each.…”

What do cyclists need to see to avoid single-bicycle crashes?

“…The IDED-method was developed to determine the visibility of contrasts in the periphery of normally sighted people and the overall visibility of contrasts for people with low vision (den Brinker and Daffertshofer 2005). The basic principles of the method are that the contrast-transfer properties of the eye's optical system are known to be nearly as good in the periphery as in the fovea (Wang et al 1997) in contrast to the visual acuity that very rapidly falls off with eccentricity (Larson and Loschky 2009). Therefore, the visibility of an object at a certain eccentricity is determined by the visual acuity associated with the eccentricity and a minimum (constant) contrast.…”

“…A visual acuity of 0.1 corresponds to an eccentricity of 208. For the relationship with eccentricity, research by Larson and Loschky (2009), who examined the limits of visual resolution in natural scene viewing, was used.…”

Does Service Employees’ Appearance Affect the Healthiness of Food Choice?

“…The second fixation measures the direction of eye movements, which reveals the influence of the manipulation (healthy vs. overweight vs. unhealthy lifestyle) on the instinctive direction of people's eyes toward healthy or unhealthy options. The initial direction of a person's gaze is triggered by the scene (Janiszewski, 1988;Larson & Loschky, 2009), and at this stage, lowlevel information, such as colors and shapes, is sufficient for an initial assessment. The gist of the scene then directs consecutive observations to areas relevant for the task at hand.…”