PERISCOPE: Integrating peripheral vision into visual search
Description: A fundamental question in human vision science is how we find relevant information in our environment. Whether we are looking for a friend amongst disembarking passengers, or a street name to establish our whereabouts, visual search behaviour is a ubiquitous part of daily life, and involves fundamental mechanisms of perception, attention, and memory. Dominant models of visual search treat the input as if it has a homogeneous resolution, and therefore assign limitations in human visual scanning abilities to central, cognitive bottlenecks high up in the brain’s hierarchy. Although important, these theories ignore the fact that both eye and brain impose severe limitations on peripheral vision, which have a profound impact on perception. Building on my well-established expertise in attention research, the PERISCOPE program tests and extends a theoretical framework which takes peripheral limitations in the visual input seriously. Specifically, this type of theory requires independent validation in neurophysiological data, connection to top-down, goal-driven processes, and testing within a broader range of visual environments without running into combinatorial explosion. To this end, the program adopts newly developed genetic algorithms in psychophysics and recent receptive field methods in fMRI to link visual search performance to a detailed functional and neurophysiological profile of peripheral vision. Furthermore, it will use state-of-the-art electroencephalographic decoding techniques to investigate how the central goals of the observer are translated to peripheral vision. When successful, the project will provide an integrated account of central and peripheral processes in visual search, which will be crucial not only for our fundamental understanding, but also for applied settings in which finding relevant information is crucial for our health, safety, and mobility. Specifically, the project uses the acquired knowledge and methods to make displays adapt to deleterious visual circumstances, specifically those occurring under age-related vision loss.
Funding type: fellowship
Funder scheme: NWO-Talentprogramma Vici 2016
Start date: 2017-11-01
End date: 2025-09-11
Investigator: Christian Nicolas Léon Olivers
Institution: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Funded outputs count: 27
Funder award ID: 453-16-002
OpenAlex ID: G424898695