The distribution of preferred orientations in the peripheral visual field

Orientation discrimination was measured for line targets in the fovea and in locations along four meridians (vertical, horizontal, 45 degrees and 135 degrees ) in the peripheral visual field. In all locations, the performance for vertical and horizontal contours was on average almost twice as good as for oblique ones. In addition, especially in peripheral locations along oblique meridians, thresholds tend to be better for radially-oriented contours compared to tangential ones. These effects are robust to length of the test lines and to small changes in position and cannot therefore be due to cortical singularities (pinwheels). The results suggest that the advantage of horizontal and vertical contours, as well as possibly of radial ones, is a manifestation of a characteristic structural property of the organization of the visual pathway.

[1]  R Vogels,et al.  Human orientation discrimination: changes with eccentricity in normal and amblyopic vision. , 1986, Investigative ophthalmology & visual science.

[2]  B. L. Zuber,et al.  Models of oculomotor behavior and control , 1981 .

[3]  Christopher L Passaglia,et al.  Orientation sensitivity of ganglion cells in primate retina , 2002, Vision Research.

[4]  A. Grinvald,et al.  The layout of iso-orientation domains in area 18 of cat visual cortex: optical imaging reveals a pinwheel-like organization , 1993, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[5]  S. Thorpe,et al.  Dynamics of orientation coding in area V1 of the awake primate , 1993, Visual Neuroscience.

[6]  G Westheimer.  Location and line orientation as distinguishable primitives in spatial vision , 1996, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences.

[7]  A. Leventhal,et al.  Retinal ganglion cell dendritic fields in old-world monkeys are oriented radially , 1986, Brain Research.

[8]  H. Bouma,et al.  Perceived orientation of isolated line segments. , 1968, Vision research.

[9]  G Westheimer,et al.  Dynamics of spatial summation in primary visual cortex of alert monkeys. , 1999, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[10]  G. Westheimer,et al.  Orientation dependency for foveal line stimuli: detection and intensity discrimination, resolution, orientation discrimination and Vernier acuity , 1998, Vision Research.

[11]  Vision Research , 1961, Nature.

[12]  R. L. Valois,et al.  The orientation and direction selectivity of cells in macaque visual cortex , 1982, Vision Research.

[13]  R. Bauer,et al.  Complementary global maps for orientation coding in upper and lower layers of the monkey's foveal striate cortex , 2004, Experimental Brain Research.

[14]  J M Zanker,et al.  Detecting the orientation of short lines in the periphery. , 1998, Australian and New Zealand journal of ophthalmology.

[15]  G. Westheimer.  The spatial grain of the perifoveal visual field , 1982, Vision Research.