Poster at the 44th annual European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP)

Title: The adaptability of the Functional Field of View to task difficulty in a gaze-contingent search paradigm: a registered abstract

The functional field of view (FFV) is a limit on the region of visual information around the current gaze position that can be effectively processed during a fixation. The size of the FFV is adaptable and is determined by retinotopic (physiological) and functional (cognitive) factors. Changes in the FFV may also reflect the difficulty of the given task (Young & Hulleman, 2013), shrinking in response to high task demands and expanding during easier tasks. Based on our previous pilot visual search experiment, we propose a registered abstract to investigate the dynamics of FFV adaptability using a gaze-contingent search task. Using the gaze-contingent search paradigm, we expect to manipulate the FFV in a controlled fashion. Our participants (N=15) will search for either an upright (easy condition) or an upside-down target (difficult condition) among a set of distractors in three difficulty conditions based on the size of the gaze-contingent aperture: a small aperture (2°) for the difficult condition, a medium-sized aperture (5°) for the average condition and a large aperture (8°) for the easy condition. We plan to conduct analyses of response times and accuracies in each of the difficulty conditions given all aperture sizes using a repeated measures ANOVA, as well as the interactions between them. A general effect we expect to observe is deteriorating performance in response to the increase of the search difficulty conditions. Data collection is planned for May-June 2022.