CENTRAL INFLUENCE ON PERIPHERAL-VISION - EXPERIMENTS WITH ROTATING SPIRAL TARGET

A clinical experimental study was performed to ascertain the influence of central vision on peripheral vision. The vision of 10 healthy youn g adults was examined using a Humphrey field analyzer while they stare d at a rotating spiral figure instead of a standard fixation target. T here was a dear decrease in the sensitivity of the research subjects' peripheral vision with the rotating spiral target compared with the st andard fixation target. In the research subjects the rotating spiral t arget induced a sense of being drawn into the spiral's center, and it had the effect of maintaining their fixation during the visual field t est. Although these results may have been induced by maintainance of v isual attention at the center of the perimeter, just as in the cocktai l party phenomenon, the authors suggest that central vision and periph eral vision are transmitted through two different mechanisms that reci procally influence each other as a parallel distributed processing sys tem.