What is going on inside the Functional Visual Field?

When you look at some location in the scene in front of you, you are obviously processing more than the ‘pixel’ at location (x,y) and you are obviously processing less than everything in the visual field. If you are searching for some target, you are seeing something everywhere in the field, but you are likely to find the target only if it is located in some region surrounding fixation. We can call that region the “functional field of view” (FVF). During a search, your eyes will rest at one spot for, perhaps, 250-300 msec. What happens inside the FVF during that time? Some models hold that all items in the FVF are processed, perhaps in parallel. Such models often propose that the size of the FVF shrinks if the task gets harder. I will argue that attention is used to sample a subset of ~4-8 available items during a single fixation. Moreover, sampling is reliably idiosyncratic. Some items are more likely to be attended than others. It is possible that this style of processing contributes to situations where observers “look but fail to see”, missing items even though those targets have clearly fallen inside the FVF.

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