Effect of the size of the field of view on the perceived amplitude of rotations of the visual scene

Efficient navigation requires a good representation of body position/orientation in the environment and an accurate updating of this representation when the body-environment relationship changes. We tested here whether the visual flow alone - i.e., no landmark - can be used to update this representation when the visual scene is rotated, and whether having a limited horizontal field of view (30 or 60 degrees), as it is the case in most virtual reality applications, degrades the performance as compared to a full field of view. Our results show that (i) the visual flow alone does not allow for accurately estimating the amplitude of rotations of the visual scene, notably giving rise to a systematic underestimation of rotations larger than 30 degrees, and (ii) having more than 30 degrees of horizontal field of view does not really improve the performance. Taken together, these results suggest that a 30 degree field of view is enough to (under)estimate the amplitude of visual rotations when only visual flow information is available, and that landmarks should probably be provided if the amplitude of the rotations has to be accurately perceived.