Humans can perceive a coherent visual scene despite a low spatial resolution in peripheral vision. How does the visual system determine whether an object exists in the periphery? We addressed this question by focusing on the extinction illusion in which a disk becomes subjectively invisible when presented at the intersection of grids. We hypothesized that the disk would go unnoticed when the stimuli with and without the disk produced the same strength of visual signals. The visual system would miss the disk by confounding the target signals with the intersection signals that should be discounted. Computational analysis revealed that the energy ratio between the stimuli with and without the disk decreased with stimulus eccentricity and such energy ratio could successfully explain the observer’s d’ to detect the disk. These results indicate that the discounting mechanism relying on stimulus energy determines the awareness toward a peripheral object.

尽管周边视觉的空间分辨率较低，但人类仍能感知连贯的视觉场景。视觉系统如何判断物体是否存在于外围？我们通过关注消光错觉来解决这个问题，其中当出现在网格的交叉点时，圆盘变得主观不可见。我们假设当有和没有磁盘的刺激产生相同强度的视觉信号时，磁盘会被忽视。视觉系统将目标信号与应该被忽略的交叉路口信号混淆，从而错过圆盘。计算分析表明，有和没有盘的刺激之间的能量比随着刺激离心率的增加而降低，这种能量比可以成功地解释观察者检测到盘的 d'。