Visual performance on synchronous and asynchronous peripheral target detection tasks

Horizontal visual lobe boundaries were measured for a peripheral target detection task using synchronous and asynchronous target presentation. The peripheral target was presented either at the beginning or end of stimulus presentation at one of three different target exposure durations for asynchronous presentation. Correct responses for the synchronous presentation were found to be much lower than that for the asynchronous one. With asynchronous presentation, exposure duration was important but not directly related to detection performance. Instead, timing of onset or offset of the target during presentation was found to affect detection performance. The results show that it is not appropriate to generalize the results of visual lobe tests obtained at static condition for visual search tasks containing dynamic content. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.