The Limits of Visual Resolution in Natural Scene Viewing
When you
look at scene, you can see very clearly at the center of vision (the
fovea),but your vision gets radically worse as the distance
from the center of vision (retinal eccentricity) increases. Therefore,
to develop theories of scene perception we must know the limits of
visual resolution are across the visual field. For over 100 years,
researchers have investigated how visual sensitivity drops off from the
fovea to the visual periphery, generally using very simple stimuli and
a fixed eye position. However, our research is among the first to
investigate these questions using freely viewed natural scene images.
We did this with a gaze-contingent multi-resolutional display, and
tested a model of retinal eccentricity-dependent contrast
sensitivity. This study (Loschky, McConkie, Yang & Miller, in
press) provides the first estimate of the limits of visual resolution
in free viewing of natural scenes. It provides important limits for
theories of scene perception, and a basis for predicting what
information in different parts of the visual field should be available
to affect scene perception.
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