Peripheral visual information is necessary for visually-guided navigation

It has been recently hypothesized that “visually-guided navigation” relies on peripheral visual input, while “scene categorization” relies on central visual input. Indeed, finding one’s way through the immediately visible environment should require only coarse representations of boundaries and obstacles to avoid, as opposed to fine-grained representations needed to ultimately identify the spatial layout (e.g., open versus closed) and/or scene content (i.e., objects in the room) necessary to recognize a place as a particular kind of place. Here we provide the strongest test of this hypothesis by investigating visually-guided navigation and scene categorization abilities in individuals with loss of peripheral vision and sparing of central vision – that is, individuals with glaucoma. If peripheral visual input is necessary for visually-guided navigation, then individuals with glaucoma will be impaired on a visually-guided navigation task, while spared on a scene categorization task. Indeed, we found that individuals with glaucoma performed disproportionately worse on the visually-guided navigation task compared to the scene categorization task, relative to typically-sighted controls. These results provide the first causal evidence that peripheral visual information is necessary for visually-guided navigation.