Abstract

Peripheral vision has been found¹ to be inferior to central vision in the analysis of spatial relationships between pattern elements even when the sizes of test stimuli have been scaled to make their neural representations cortically similar. We investigated what kind of size-scaling equalizes the perception of spatial relationships in central and peripheral vision. In our experiments two patterns consisting of short line segments were exposed for 140 ms, and the observer had to decide whether the patterns were identical or mirror symmetric. The size of the pattern was varied to find the threshold size corresponding to 75% of correct responses at each retinal location. The scaling required for threshold discrimination between identity and mirror symmetry was found to be similar to the size-scaling proposed for Vernier acuity tasks.²

© 1988 Optical Society of America