TAP

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that our TAP article made the cover. TAP is the Transactions on Applied Perception, a journal whose purpose "is to further the development of inter-disciplinary research that crosses the boundaries between perception and computer science disciplines such as graphics, vision, acoustics and haptics." The simple-looking fuzzy color blobs depict the extent of the human retina's sensitivity to the RGB wavelengths (determined empirically by other researchers). Each blob depicts our 180 deg field of view. The whitish blob is a composite of the three colors showing pronounced eccentric sensitivity to blue, which makes sense ecologically. We used these images as masks in a gaze-contingent experiment (which is what the paper is about). Results showed that while we can degrade spatial resolution of images in a gaze-contingent manner without affecting performance such as visual search, we can't reduce color resolution as readily. The difference is roughly 5 degrees (spatial sensitivity) vs. 20 degrees (color sensitivity). Which means that color is important, in a nutshell.