Quantification of Visual Lobe Shape Characteristics

Peripheral vision plays an important role in human visual behavior. Performance in visual search and orientation tasks in general depends largely on peripherally detected information. Among the factors affecting peripheral visual performance are the size and shape of the effective visual field. Traditional theories of visual search work on the assumption of perfectly circular or elliptical visual lobes. Consequently efforts were put into developing mathematical models for simulating human visual search behavior. Few recent research results, however, indicated that visual fields have irregular boundaries, and the degree of irregularity varies with subjects and experimental conditions. In the current study, 40 subjects of ages ranging from 19 to 24 years had their visual fields measured. The shape characteristics of their visual fields were then quantified with different geometric methods for demonstrating lobe shape irregularity.