Methodological Considerations to Strengthen Studies of Peripheral Vision

In a recent issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Cohen et al. [1] argue that the study of visual summary statistics represents an elegant method to account for the richness of visual experience in the periphery. We resoundingly agree that employing ensemble statistics is a strong step towards resolving questions of how conscious we are of our visual surroundings. However, we think the explanatory power of this approach can be augmented by focusing on two specific areas: (i) psychophysical quantification of metacognitive capacities and decision biases associated with peripheral vision; (ii) distinction between perceptual decisions that involve different levels of detail. Consideration of these issues will facilitate the development of precise hypotheses about peripheral phenomenology and yield useful data from experiments investigating summary statistics; we explain how below.