Functional Division of the Visual Field

Publisher Summary The human eyes do not have the same resolution and sensitivity at every position of the retina. Fine details can only be discriminated efficiently by the fovea (the central part of the retina). At higher eccentricities, perceptual acuity decreases rapidly, and only coarse-grained information can be resolved. Consequently, peripheral vision is not particularly suited for object identification or word recognition, as these processes rely on detailed image analyses. Eye movements, or saccades, are required to project image areas onto the fovea. Saccades are not made to random image locations. Most fixations occur on interesting parts of the stimulus, such as words in a text or objects in a scene. Extrafoveal information can be used successfully to guide saccades to informative stimulus locations. By disentangling foveal and peripheral vision the concepts of moving mask and moving window are studied. Coarse peripheral information is preferred to obtain global image characteristics, while object localization gets benefited most from a high resolution peripheral image.

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