An investigation of detection biases in the unattended periphery during simulated driving

While people often think they veridically perceive much of the visual surround, recent findings indicate that when asked to detect targets such as gratings embedded in visual noise, observers make more false alarms in the unattended periphery. Do these results from psychophysics studies generalize to more ecologically valid settings? We used a modern game engine to create a simulated driving environment where participants (as drivers) had to make judgments about the colors of pedestrians’ clothing in the periphery. Confirming our hypothesis based on previous psychophysics studies, we found that subjects showed liberal biases for unattended locations when detecting specific colors of pedestrians’ clothing. A second experiment showed that this finding was not simply due to a confirmation bias in decision-making when subjects were uncertain. Together, these results support the idea that in everyday visual experience, there is subjective inflation of experienced detail in the periphery, which may happen at the decisional level.