Development of a novel task to assess peripheral awareness in the presence of foveal distractors

Awareness of the visual periphery is a crucial aspect of perception. However, few studies assess the ability to detect peripheral stimuli while competing stimuli of the same type are simultaneously displayed in the center of the visual field. In this study, participants were asked to judge the dominant orientation in a display that contained lines in both the periphery and the center of the visual field; however, the dominant orientation was always in the periphery. Our research advances understanding of peripheral awareness in two ways. Firstly, performance on our task predicts performance on a validated task assessing foveal (central) perception, the random dot kinematogram (RDK), perhaps due to shared mechanisms of global pooling in both tasks. Secondly, our task provides evidence of “subjective inflation,” the phenomenon in which participants overestimate their confidence of peripheral perception relative to foveal perception.