The perceived size and shape of objects in peripheral vision
Date
17/08/2016Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Little is known about how we perceive the size and shape of objects in far peripheral vision. Observations made during an artistic study of visual space suggest that objects appear smaller and compressed in the periphery compared with central vision. To test this, we conducted three experiments. In Experiment 1, we asked participants to draw how a set of peripheral discs appeared when viewed peripherally without time or eye movement constraints. In Experiment 2, we used the method of constant stimuli to measure when a briefly presented peripheral stimulus appeared bigger or smaller compared with a central fixated one. In Experiment 3, we measured how accurate participants were in discriminating shapes presented briefly in the periphery. In Experiment 1, the peripheral discs were reported as appearing significantly smaller than the central disc, and as having an elliptical or polygonal contour. In Experiment 2, participants judged the size of peripheral discs as being significantly smaller when compared with the central disc across most of the peripheral field, and in Experiment 3, participants were quite accurate in reporting the shape of the peripheral object, except in the far periphery. Our results show that objects in the visual periphery are perceived as diminished in size when presented for long and brief exposures, suggesting diminution is an intrinsic feature of the structure of the visual space. Shape distortions, however, are reported only with longer exposures.
Citation
Baldwin , J , Burleigh , A , Pepperell , R & Ruta , N 2016 , ' The perceived size and shape of objects in peripheral vision ' , i-Perception , vol. 7 , no. 4 , pp. 1-23 . https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669516661900
Publication
i-Perception
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2041-6695Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2016. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Description
This research was supported by funding from the Vice Chancellor’s Board of Cardiff Metropolitan University.Collections
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