Now You See It, Now You Don't

Overview

Objectives/Goals The objective of this experiment is to determine if the perception of objects in our peripheral vision is influenced by the object's color. I believe that people will be able to see the red-colored object best in their peripheral vision. Methods/Materials I built a vision protractor using a foam board, a pushpin, and a cup. I also cut out blue, red, green, and yellow circles of the same size and glued them to a Popsicle stick. I asked each test subject to stare at the pushpin that was centered on the vision protractor, then moved the stick with the yellow circle on it along the edge of the protractor, first to the left and then to the right until the test subject could not see it anymore. I recorded the angle at which the object disappeared from the subject's vision for each side. I repeated this with the blue, green, and red circles and recorded all the results in degrees. Results According to my experiment, 87% of the test subjects were able to see red in their peripheral vision best. Blue was the second easiest to see, followed by green and yellow. Conclusions/Discussion Red was the easiest to see in the test subjects' peripheral vision. This could be because red is the color of blood and our mind automatically associates blood with danger - and danger captures our attention. It could also be due to the fact that humans see the most red wavelengths out of any color. Yellow was the hardest to perceive in their peripheral vision because it was the lightest color and therefore seemed to fade into the background. Studies also show yellow is the most irritating color to the eye.

Competition history

• CSEF 2014 Cognitive Science (Junior Division Only) · Entry J0714

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• CSEF Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2014 project