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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Dec 2, 2025

Assessing Early Stage Open-Angle Glaucoma in Patients by Isolated-Check Visual Evoked Potential

Assessing Early Stage Open-Angle Glaucoma in Patients by Isolated-Check Visual Evoked Potential

Published on: May 25, 2020

Events are perceived earlier in peripheral vision.

Ljubica Jovanovic¹, Pascal Mamassian²

¹Laboratoire des systèmes perceptifs, Département d'études cognitives, École Normale Supérieure, PSL University, CNRS, Paris, France; Neuropsychologie Cognitive, Physiopathologie de la Schizophrénie, Inserm UR 1114, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France.

Current Biology : CB

|November 3, 2020

Summary

Visual perception timing varies across the visual field. Events in peripheral vision are often perceived as occurring earlier than they actually do.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Neuroscience
Visual Perception

Background:

Visual perception involves complex neural processing with varying latencies across the visual hierarchy and field.
Predicting the precise moment of perceived visual events is challenging due to physiological response diversity and limitations of traditional latency measurement methods.

Discussion:

This study introduces a novel method to directly assess the perceived timing of visual events, bypassing confounds of response times and relative judgments.
Findings reveal a significant bias in perceived timing, with peripheral stimuli being systematically reported as earlier than central stimuli.

Key Insights:

The perceived moment of a visual event is not solely determined by physical stimulus presentation but is influenced by spatial location within the visual field.
Peripheral visual information appears to be temporally weighted differently, leading to an underestimation of its true latency in perception.

Outlook:

Future research should explore the neural mechanisms underlying this peripheral timing bias.
Investigating how this bias affects real-world visual tasks and decision-making is crucial.