Peripheral vision in real-world tasks: A systematic review

Abstract

Peripheral vision is fundamental for many real-world tasks, including walking, driving, and aviation. Nonetheless, there has been no effort to connect these applied literatures to research in peripheral vision in basic vision science or sports science. To close this gap, we analyzed 60 relevant papers, chosen according to objective criteria. Applied research, with its real-world time constraints, complex stimuli, and performance measures, reveals new functions of peripheral vision. Peripheral vision is used to monitor the environment (e.g., road edges, traffic signs, or malfunctioning lights), in ways that differ from basic research. Applied research uncovers new actions that one can perform solely with peripheral vision (e.g., steering a car, climbing stairs). An important use of peripheral vision is that it helps compare the position of one's body/vehicle to objects in the world. In addition, many real-world tasks require multitasking, and the fact that peripheral vision provides degraded but useful information means that tradeoffs are common in deciding whether to use peripheral vision or move one's eyes. These tradeoffs are strongly influenced by factors like expertise, age, distraction, emotional state, task importance, and what the observer already knows. These tradeoffs make it hard to infer from eye movements alone what information is gathered from peripheral vision and what tasks we can do without it. Finally, we recommend three ways in which basic, sport, and applied science can benefit each other's methodology, furthering our understanding of peripheral vision more generally.

Keywords: Aviation; Driving; Peripheral vision; Sports science; Walking.

Fig. 1

Illustration of an urban street scene (“Crowded Street With Cars Passing By”, by Suzukii Xingfu; sourced from Pexels.com, under CC0) with cars, motorbikes, and pedestrians; (a) shows the entire scene, (b) shows a visualization of a useful field, approximately 15° radial from fixation, illustrating a commonly held misconception of the region of visual space around the point of fixation in which observers can perceive visual information, with the surrounding region faded out to illustrate how much information is missing

Fig. 2

PRISMA flowchart showing the number of articles excluded and included in the different stages of the screening process. See Table 1 for inclusion and exclusion criteria

Fig. 3

The left image (Sara Kurfeß, CC0 1.0) shows easy-to-walk stairs while the right image (taken by Greenville, SC Daily Photo, CC0 1.0) shows difficult stairs. The easy stairs are regular and can likely be walked using only peripheral vision. In contrast, the stairs on the right are very uneven and narrow (and are likely slippery due to the wet leaves on them). Their irregular nature will not be represented in sufficient detail with peripheral vision, requiring a pedestrian to look at each step as they ascend or descend them