Effect of nonlinear magnification on peripheral target detection performance

This paper reports an experiment on the effect of two levels of nonlinear magnification, M-scaling (MS), one-fourth MS, on the detection of peripheral visual targets on four axes. Target detection performance with the two levels of scaled stimuli was better than that with non-scaled stimuli as measured by the lengthening of sensitivity limits and increased number of targets enclosed within the sensitivity limits, on each of the axes tested. There was an unexpected decline in performance at the first target location for the MS condition, and also a performance increment in the last target location on both ends of every axis for both scaling conditions. Possible explanation in terms of diminishing crowding effect was discussed. The results of this study showed the importance of selecting appropriate inter-character spacing as well as character size for displays designed to facilitate performance on visual search tasks. Relevancy to industry The work examined the viability of the use of nonlinear magnification of visual contents for variable resolution displays with a view to increasing visual lobe size and hence reducing search time for visual search tasks performed in many industrial environments. The results would provide vital information for establishment of an optimized inspection system design. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.