Francesca Fortenbaugh

Boston VA Hospital

The influence of visual field boundaries on attentional resolution and crowding performance

 

Visual perception is limited along multiple dimensions, from spatial resolution to the amount of information that can be acquired within a single glance. What role, if any, do visual field boundaries play in shaping perception in healthy, normal-vision observers? The average binocular visual field in humans can be described as a bi-elliptical contour. Yet the actual size of the visual field, particularly along the vertical meridian, varies across individuals. In this talk I will present evidence that visual field extent influences spatial processing at locations far away from visual field boundaries by testing the relationship between individual differences in vertical visual field extent and performance on a visual crowding task. The results of these experiments suggest a new metric for modeling the structure of retinotopic visual space that may help to account for variability in performance across individuals and regions of the visual field.