Retinal location and visual processing rate

Although previous studies have shown that the time required to process visual stimuli increases for 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 tachistoscopic masking tasks to generate time-accuracy functions for stimuli at different retinal locations. All results indicated that only the time intercept parameter of the time-accuracy function is affected by retinal location of stimulation. This finding suggests that it takes longer for information to become available to some decision mechanism with stimuli displaced away from the fovea, but that the actual rate of extracting information is not influenced by retinal locus of stimulation.