What is visible across the visual field?

Abstract

It is sometimes claimed that because the resolution and sensitivity of visual perception are better in the fovea than in the periphery, peripheral vision cannot support the same kinds of colour and sharpness percepts as foveal vision. The fact that a scene nevertheless seems colourful and sharp throughout the visual field then poses a puzzle. In this study, I use a detailed model of human spatial vision to estimate the visibility of certain properties of natural scenes, including aspects of colourfulness, sharpness, and blurriness, across the visual field. The model is constructed to reproduce basic aspects of human contrast and colour sensitivity over a range of retinal eccentricities. I apply the model to colourful, complex natural scene images, and estimate the degree to which colour and edge information are present in the model’s representation of the scenes. I find that, aside from the intrinsic drift in the spatial scale of the representation, there are not large qualitative differences between foveal and peripheral representations of ‘colourfulness’ and ‘sharpness’.