The role of peripheral vision in saccade planning: Learning from people with tunnel vision

Abstract

Both visually salient and top-down information are important in eye movement control, but their relative roles in the planning of daily saccades are unclear. We investigated the effect of peripheral vision loss on saccadic behaviors in patients with tunnel vision (visual field diameters 7°–16°) in visual search and real-world walking experiments. The patients made up to two saccades per second to their pre-saccadic blind areas, about half of which had no overlap between the post- and pre-saccadic views. In the visual search experiment, visual field size and the background (blank or picture) did not affect the saccade sizes and direction of patients (n=9). In the walking experiment, the patients (n=5) and normal controls (n=3) had similar distributions of saccade sizes and directions. These findings might provide a clue about the extent of the top-down mechanism influence on eye movement control.

Impact of Peripheral Field Loss on the Execution of Natural Actions: A Study With Glaucomatous Patients and Normally Sighted People

“…In contrast, Crabb et al 7 found that patients with glaucoma made more saccades, fixations, and smooth pursuit eye movements per second than did controls, and the mean fixation duration was shorter. Luo et al 18 reported that patients with peripheral field loss and age-matched controls executed similar eye movements when performing visual search and real-world walking experiments. Natural tasks involving execution of actions differ from visual search tasks on static small images.…”

The Role of Central and Peripheral Vision in Expert Decision Making

“…It is perhaps more surprising, though, that performance should diminish in the moving window condition when only peripheral vision was removed. It is frequently suggested that less-skilled observers experience perceptual narrowing in demanding situations with which they may not be familiar (eg Luo et al 2008;Weltman and Egstrom 1966); as a result, the less-skilled participants may have been expected to rely primarily on central vision. Our findings show that this was not the case.…”

“…We expected skilled basketball players to perform better than lesser-skilled players irrespective of the viewing condition, reflecting a superior ability to use both central and peripheral vision to support context-specific decision making. In contrast, because less-skilled observers are frequently found to experience perceptual narrowing in unfamiliar, demanding situations (eg Luo et al 2008;Weltman and Egstrom 1966), we expected the decision making of the less-skilled participants to be almost wholly supported by central vision. More specifically, we expected their performance to decrease in the moving mask condition when central vision was removed, but to remain unchanged in the moving window condition when only peripheral vision was removed and central vision was preserved.…”

“…In the moving mask condition a plain black mask of 5° eccentricity was used to restrict information uptake to that available from the periphery. Black opaque occlusion was used to ensure that information pick-up was exclusively available from the central and peripheral visual fields in the moving window and moving mask conditions, respectively [see also Cornelissen et al (2005) and Luo et al (2008), for the purpose of inducing artificial central and peripheral visual field defects]. The experimental test film consisted of a total of 48 trials (16 video clips × 3 viewing conditions) with all participants viewing the clips in the same randomised order.…”

Retinotopic to Spatiotopic Mapping in Blind Patients Implanted With the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis

“…This mechanism is similar to patients with peripheral visual loss that saccade to the blind area. 14 We therefore needed to verify that the brain can accurately spatiotopically map the retinotopic artificial vision from the electrical stimulation and that we have a method to calibrate eye trackers for the blind.…”