Reduced saliency of peripheral targets in gaze-contingent multi-resolutional displays: blended versus sharp boundary windows

Gaze-contingent multi-resolutional displays (GCMRDs) have been proposed to solve the processing and bandwidth bottleneck in many single-user displays, by dynamically placing high-resolution in a window at the center of gaze, with lower resolution everywhere else. GCMRDs are also useful for investigating the perceptual processes involved in natural scene viewing. Several such studies suggest that potential saccade targets in degraded regions are less salient than those in the high-resolution window. Consistent with this, Reingold, Loschky, Stampe and Shen [2001b] found longer initial saccadic latencies to a salient peripheral target in conditions with a high-resolution window and degraded surround than in an all low-pass filtered no-window condition. Nevertheless, these results may have been due to parafoveal load caused by saliency of the boundary between the high- and low-resolution areas. The current study extends Reingold, et al. [2001b] by comparing both sharp- and blended-resolution boundary conditions with an all low-resolution no-window condition. The results replicate the previous findings [Reingold et al. 2001b] but indicate that the effect is unaltered by the type of window boundary (sharp or blended). This rules out the parafoveal load hypothesis, while further supporting the hypothesis that potential saccade targets in the degraded region are less salient than those in the high-resolution region.