Abstract
Recent evidence indicates that human observers often overestimate their capacity to make perceptual judgments in the visual periphery. How can we quantify the degree to which this overestimation occurs? We describe how applications of Signal Detection Theoretic frameworks provide one promising approach to measure both detection biases and task performance capacities for peripheral stimuli. By combining these techniques with new metacognitive measures of perceptual confidence (such as meta-d'; Maniscalco & Lau, 2012), one can obtain a clearer picture regarding (1) when subjects can simply perform perceptual tasks in the periphery, and (2) when they have true metacognitive awareness of the visual surround. In this talk, we describe results from recent experiments employing these quantitative techniques, comparing and contrasting the visual system's capacity to encode summary statistics in both the center and periphery of the visual field.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017