ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
The limits of color awareness during active, real-world vision.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed.
- How Does Peripheral Vision Feel Rich? A Selective Review.Journal of eye movement research · 2026Review
- Running virtual reality experiments online: A brief introduction and tutorial.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Color needs luminance for visual selection during scene search.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- Contributions of Distinct Attention Mechanisms to Saccadic Choices in a Gamified, Dynamic Environment.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Methodological foundations for locating the neural correlates of low-level visual experience.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Contributions of distinct attention mechanisms to saccadic choices in a gamified, dynamic environment.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Effect of multi-refresh-rate method on user experience: sustained attention and inattentional blindness.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2025Article
- Neural network assisted annotation and analysis tool to study in-vivo foveolar cone photoreceptor topography.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Memory-based predictions prime perceptual judgments across head turns in immersive, real-world scenes.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- Consistent metacognitive efficiency and variable response biases in peripheral vision.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- Review
- The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex prioritizes social learning during rest.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Binocular rivalry under naturalistic geometry: Evidence from worlds simulated in virtual reality.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- The Reality of a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Environment Tested via Lightness Perception.Journal of imaging · 2024Article
- A novel, semi-automatic procedure for generating slow change blindness stimuli.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2024Article
- More than words: can free reports adequately measure the richness of perception?Neuroscience of consciousness · 2024Article
- An embarrassment of richnesses: the PFC isn't the content NCC.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2024Article
- Using XR (Extended Reality) for Behavioral, Clinical, and Learning Sciences Requires Updates in Infrastructure and Funding.Policy insights from the behavioral and brain sciences · 2023Article
- Attentional allocation and the pan-field color illusion.Journal of vision · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Color ignites visual experience, imbuing the world with meaning, emotion, and richness. As soon as an observer opens their eyes, they have the immediate impression of a rich, colorful experience that encompasses their entire visual world. Here, we show that this impression is surprisingly inaccurate. We used head-mounted virtual reality (VR) to place observers in immersive, dynamic real-world environments, which they naturally explored via saccades and head turns. Meanwhile, we monitored their gaze with in-headset eye tracking and then systematically altered the visual environments such that only the parts of the scene they were looking at were presented in color and the rest of the scene (i.e., the visual periphery) was entirely desaturated. We found that observers were often completely unaware of these drastic alterations to their visual world. In the most extreme case, almost a third of observers failed to notice when less than 5% of the visual display was presented in color. This limitation on perceptual awareness could not be explained by retinal neuroanatomy or previous studies of peripheral visual processing using more traditional psychophysical approaches. In a second study, we measured color detection thresholds using a staircase procedure while a set of observers intentionally attended to the periphery. Still, we found that observers were unaware when a large portion of their field of view was desaturated. Together, these results show that during active, naturalistic viewing conditions, our intuitive sense of a rich, colorful visual world is largely incorrect.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.