Abstract
The resolution of perception is heterogeneous across (i.e., eccentricity) and around (i.e., polar angle) the visual field: it decreases with eccentricity and is worse along the vertical than horizontal meridians. Are people aware of it? Traditionally, it has been assumed that people are generally unaware of the perceptual disparity and tend to believe visual experience is rich across the whole visual field. However, despite its prevalence, the assumption has not been tested systematically by empirical investigations. Here, we examined whether people could monitor the disparity in the perceptual resolution across and around the visual field, by participants’ guessing patterns in a degradation (i.e., loss of high spatial frequency information) localization task. Participants localized which face was degraded among nine faces simultaneously appearing at nine locations; in the fovea (fixation at the center of the screen), parafovea (left, right, above, and below fixation at 4° eccentricity), and periphery (left, right, above, and below fixation at 10° eccentricity). We presumed that if participants could monitor the perceptual disparity, on degradation absence trials, they would exhibit compensatory guessing patterns based on counterfactual reasoning (“The degraded face must have been presented at locations with the low perceptual resolution, because if it were presented at locations with the high perceptual resolution, I would have detected it.”): higher proportions of reporting locations in the periphery than the fovea and along the vertical than horizontal meridians. In two experiments, we observed guessing patterns supporting that people could monitor the disparity in the perceptual resolution across but not around the visual field. In addition, we found that explicit knowledge about the perceptual disparity is only restrictively associated with guessing patterns, which suggests that explicit metacognitive knowledge might not be sufficient to guide the trial-by-trial metacognitive monitoring of the perceptual resolution.