Imagine driving a vehicle on a day when there is a lot of traffic. In a complex task like this one, we need to scan the environment constantly and look at different parts of the scene to monitor everything that is going on. To do this, the visual system not only examines and processes what is in the centre of our gaze - such as a car, a traffic light or a pedestrian - and projects it onto the area of the retina that helps us get a detailed view of the scene - the fovea - but also monitors what is happening in the rest of the visual field, in the periphery.
Now, a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) provides new insights into how humans process foveal and peripheral visual information when we direct our gaze to a particular point in the scene during extremely brief fixation periods. The paper reveals that there are differences in the temporal dynamics of visual processing during these fixation periods. This discovery could have important implications for how we understand visual information in complex and dynamic environments, such as during driving and other activities that require high precision.
The study is led by Cristina de la Malla, a researcher of the Faculty of Psychology and the Institute of Neurosciences at the University of Barcelona (UBneuro), and Martina Poletti, researcher at the Department of Neurosciences at the University of Rochester and the Center for Visual Science at the same university (United States).
Understanding the temporal dynamics of visual processing
The paper outlines a new scenario of how the visual system processes information from the foveal and peripheral areas. Specifically, the authors have compared the ability to correctly localize changes that occur in the foveal and peripheral areas during the brief period of fixation according to the exact time at which these changes occur.
