Mid-level visual processing in peripheral vision

你能用“眼角的余光”看到什么？人们通常认为周边视力“不好”，而中心视力“好”。毕竟，我们几乎一直在移动我们的眼睛，把世界的不同部分带到我们更集中的中心视野中。但事情可能没有那么简单。举个例子，拿着纸巾管走来走去，把你的视线局限在“好的”中心部分，这将是一项挑战和令人沮丧的事情。相反，这个项目考虑了中央视觉和周边视觉在视觉感知中发挥不同功能的可能性。这项工作使用的显示器会根据人们所处的位置而变化，从而分离出人们可以看到的视野的哪一部分，然后测量整个视野中广泛的基本视觉过程。它正在测试一个普遍的假设，即中心视觉在感知上是有组织的，从而以3D物体和表面的形式呈现世界，而外围视觉在感知上是无组织的，从而产生更像纹理而不是物体的2D呈现。这项工作可以为特定视野丧失的个体所经历的不同特定功能缺陷提供解释，例如黄斑变性引起的中央性丧失或青光眼引起的周围性丧失。该项目由感知、行动和认知（PAC）、刺激竞争研究的既定计划（EPSCoR）和智能与互联健康（SCH）共同资助。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

What can you see out of “the corner of your eye”? It is common for people to think that peripheral vision is “bad” while central vision is “good”. After all, we are almost constantly moving our eyes to bring different parts of the world into our more-focused central field of view. But it may not be as simple as that. Walking around with paper towel tubes limiting your view to only the “good” central part, for example, would be challenging and frustrating. Instead, this project considers the possibility that central and peripheral vision serve different functional roles in visual perception more generally.This work uses displays that change depending on where a person is looking to isolate what part of the visual field people can see, and then to measure a wide range of basic visual processes across the visual field. It is testing the general hypothesis that central vision is perceptually organized, resulting in representations of the world in terms of 3D objects and surfaces, whereas peripheral vision is perceptually unorganized, resulting in 2D representations that are more like textures than objects. This work can provide explanations for different specific functional deficits that are experienced by individuals with specific visual field loss, such as central loss from macular degeneration or peripheral loss from glaucoma. This project is jointly funded by Perception, Action and Cognition (PAC), the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), and Smart and Connected Health (SCH).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.