Recent literature in this area has provided conflicting anecdotes and results regarding decision-making in the periphery across an array of paradigms. For instance, according to one influential account, participants are often surprised at the mismatch between the visual eccentricity where they
think they will be able to make accurate perceptual judgments (such as identifying a playing card) and how close to the fovea objects must actually be before judgments are correct (
Cohen et al., 2016). Empirical support for overconfidence in the periphery has been demonstrated in one task which showed that on incorrect trials, participants were more confident in judgments of crowded visual stimuli compared to single visual stimuli, despite performance being lower overall in the crowded condition (
Odegaard, Chang, Lau, & Cheung, 2018). Further, research on redundancy-masking found overconfidence in perception of lines 10° into the visual periphery (
Yildirim & Sayam, 2022). These findings of overestimations of visual experiences have been extended to color perception. In a phenomenon known as the “pan-field color illusion,” observers tend to perceive images with a chromatic center and an achromatic periphery (chimera images) as fully colored (
Balas & Sinha, 2007). This overestimation of color perception was also observed in dynamic real-world scenery; around a third of participants failed to notice when researchers desaturated up to 95% of a 360° real-world scene presented via a VR headset (
Cohen, Botch, & Robertson, 2020). Moreover, the pan-field color illusion has been shown to change as a function of eccentricity.
Okubo and Yokosawa (2023) found that the tendency to perceive chimera images as fully colored increased as the monochromatic aspect was confined further to the periphery; this finding was modulated by the attentional load of the main task (how fast stimuli were presented) for some eccentricities and not for others. However, being too confident in our judgments in the periphery does not extend across all paradigms: other recent work has demonstrated underconfidence in the periphery (
Toscani, Mamassian, & Valsecchi, 2021) or even shown that metacognitive sensitivity can track task performance reasonably well, at least in the domain of color diversity judgments (
Hawkins et al., 2022). Research has also shown that when peripheral stimuli are magnified to match the increased V2 receptive fields for central vision (and thereby match sensitivity), participants rate the color of two identical-color stimuli more similarly (
Zeleznikow-Johnston, Aizawa, Yamada, & Tsuchiya, 2023). Thus, to date, the literature is characterized by a lack of consensus regarding how well observers can perform visual tasks in the periphery, the degree to which confidence may (or may not) track task accuracy, and whether human observers display optimal or suboptimal decision criteria (
Rahnev & Denison, 2018) for perceptual decisions in this region of space.