Retinal location and visual processing rate.

Although previous studies have shown that the time required to process visual stimuli,in' ".".r"r fo"r presentations away from the fovea, the evidence concerning the exact nature of this increase is inconclusive. Three experiments were conducted using both reaction time and tachis' toscopic masking tasks to gene"ale timeaccuracy functions for stimuli at different retinal loca' tions.-eU resulti indicated that only the time intercept parameter of the timeaccuracy func' tion is affected by retinal location of sHmulation. This finding suggests that it takes longer for information to become available to some decision mechanism with stimuli displaced away{rom the fovea. but that the actual rate of extracting information is not influenced by retinal locus of stimulation.