Effects of Peripheral Vision on Eye Movements: A Virtual Reality Study on Gaze Allocation in Naturalistic Tasks

Elena Hitzel pursues the idea that human gaze locations are influenced by currently non-fixated objects that are visible in the peripheral visual field. Using eye tracking equipment and a Virtual Reality system to provide naturalistic tasks, the author shows that gaze is biased towards a neighboring object, especially when this object is relevant to the subject’s current task. This suggests that peripheral vision is used in the allocation of gaze in daily life and that this bias can be interpreted in terms of a compromise between foveal and peripheral information gain. The benefit of this bias in natural vision is discussed in the context of bottom-up and top-down theories.