The role of central and peripheral vision in perceiving the direction of self-motion

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Abstract
Three experiments were performed to examine the role that central and peripheral vision play in the perception of the direction of translational self-motion, or heading, from optical flow. When the focus of radial outflow was in central vision, heading accuracy was slightly higher with central circular displays (10°–25° diameter) than with peripheral annular displays (40° diameter), indicating that central vision is somewhat more sensitive to this information. Performance dropped rapidly as the eccentricity of the focus of outflow increased, indicating that the periphery does not accurately extract radial flow patterns. Together with recent research on vection and postural adjustments, these results contradict theperipheral dominance hypothesis that peripheral vision is specialized for perception of self-motion. We propose afunctional sensitivity hypothesis—that. self-motion is perceived on the basis of optical information rather than the retinal locus of stimulation, but that central and peripheral vision are differentially sensitive to the information characteristic of each retinal region.

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