Investigating spatial vision and dynamic attentional selection using a gaze-contingent multiresolutional display.
This study examined spatial vision and attentional selection using a gaze-contingent multiresolutional display, with a dynamic, gaze-centered, high-resolution window and lower resolution periphery. Visual search times and eye movements from 15 participants in a 3 x 3 design (Window Radius x Peripheral Resolution) suggest that contrast sensitivity as a function of retinal eccentricity affects attentional selection and visual processing. Smaller windows led to longer search times and shorter saccades; lower peripheral resolution also shortened saccades (all ps < .05) as a result of avoiding fixating degraded areas. Fixation durations, although longer for smaller windows (p < .05), were unaffected by whether the next saccade went within or outside the window. These results are explained through (a) competition among potential saccade targets where above-threshold filtering reduces an object's relative salience and (b) generally disrupted visual processing.
Loschky
Lester C
LC
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. loschky@uiuc.edu
McConkie
George W
GW
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011601:Psychophysics; D012438:Saccades; D013028:Space Perception