Seeing the truck, but missing the cyclist: effects of blur on duration thresholds for road hazard detection.

Drivers must respond promptly to a wide range of possible road hazards, from trucks veering into their lane to pedestrians stepping onto the road. While drivers' vision is tested at the point of licensure, visual function can degrade, and drivers may not notice how these changes impact their ability to notice and respond to events in the world in a timely fashion. To safely examine the potential consequences of visual degradation on hazard detection, we performed two experiments examining the impact of simulated optical blur on participants' viewing duration thresholds in a hazard detection task, as a proxy for eyes-on-road duration behind the wheel. Examining this question with older and younger participants, across two experiments, we found an overall increase in viewing duration thresholds under blurred conditions, such that younger and older adults were similarly impacted by blur. Critically, in both groups, we found that the increment in thresholds produced by blur was larger for non-vehicular road hazards (pedestrians, cyclists and animals) compared to vehicular road hazards (cars, trucks and buses). This work suggests that blur poses a particular problem for drivers detecting non-vehicular road users, a population considerably more vulnerable in a collision than vehicular road users. These results also highlight the importance of taking into account the type of hazard when considering the impacts of blur on road hazard detection.

Is resilience a unifying concept for the biological sciences?

There is increasing interest in applying resilience concepts at different scales of biological organization to address major interdisciplinary challenges from cancer to climate change. It is unclear, however, whether resilience can be a unifying concept consistently applied across the breadth of the biological sciences, or whether there is limited capacity for integration. In this review, we draw on literature from molecular biology to community ecology to ascertain commonalities and shortcomings in how resilience is measured and interpreted. Resilience is studied at all levels of biological organization, although the term is often not used. There is a suite of resilience mechanisms conserved across biological scales, and there are tradeoffs that affect resilience. Resilience is conceptually useful to help diverse researchers think about how biological systems respond to perturbations, but we need a richer lexicon to describe the diversity of perturbations, and we lack widely applicable metrics of resilience.

A phylogenomic perspective on interspecific competition.

Evolutionary processes may have substantial impacts on community assembly, but evidence for phylogenetic relatedness as a determinant of interspecific interaction strength remains mixed. In this perspective, we consider a possible role for discordance between gene trees and species trees in the interpretation of phylogenetic signal in studies of community ecology. Modern genomic data show that the evolutionary histories of many taxa are better described by a patchwork of histories that vary along the genome rather than a single species tree. If a subset of genomic loci harbour trait-related genetic variation, then the phylogeny at these loci may be more informative of interspecific trait differences than the genome background. We develop a simple method to detect loci harbouring phylogenetic signal and demonstrate its application through a proof-of-principle analysis of Penicillium genomes and pairwise interaction strength. Our results show that phylogenetic signal that may be masked genome-wide could be detectable using phylogenomic techniques and may provide a window into the genetic basis for interspecific interactions.

Highly dangerous road hazards are not immune from the low prevalence effect.

The low prevalence effect (LPE) is a cognitive limitation commonly found in visual search tasks, in which observers miss rare targets. Drivers looking for road hazards are also subject to the LPE. However, not all road hazards are equal; a paper bag floating down the road is much less dangerous than a rampaging moose. Here, we asked whether perceived hazardousness modulated the LPE. To examine this, we took a dataset in which 48 raters assessed the perceived dangerousness of hazards in recorded road videos (Song et al. in Behav Res Methods, 2023. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02299-8 ) and correlated the ratings with data from a hazard detection task using the same stimuli with varying hazard prevalence rates (Kosovicheva et al. in Psychon Bull Rev 30(1):212-223, 2023. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02159-0 ). We found that while hazard detectability increased monotonically with hazardousness ratings, the LPE was comparable across perceived hazardousness levels. Our findings are consistent with the decision criterion account of the LPE, in which target rarity induces a conservative shift in criterion. Importantly, feedback was necessary for a large and consistent LPE; when participants were not given feedback about their accuracy, the most dangerous hazards showed a non-significant LPE. However, eliminating feedback was not enough to induce the opposite of the LPE-prevalence induced concept change (Levari et al. in Science 360(6396):1465-1467, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap8731 ), in which participants adopt a more liberal criterion when instances of a category become rare. Our results suggest that the road hazard LPE may be somewhat affected by the inherent variability of driving situations, but is still observed for highly dangerous hazards.

Sourdough starter culture microbiomes influence physical and chemical properties of wheat bread.

Sourdough fermentation is an ancient leavening method that uses wild yeasts to produce carbon dioxide, contributing to bread rise, and bacteria which produce organic acids. Sourdough starter cultures are known to be diverse in terms of the microorganisms they comprise and while specific genera and species of microorganisms have been identified from starters and associated with specific attributes, overarching relationships between sourdough starter culture microbiomes and bread quality are not well understood. The objective of this study was to characterize differences in the physical and chemical properties of breads produced with sourdough starter cultures with unique microbiomes. Sourdough starter cultures (n = 20) of known microbial populations were used to produce wheat-based dough and bread, which were analyzed for chemical and physical properties then compared to their microbial populations in order to identify relationships between microbial profiles and dough/bread qualities. All samples were also compared to bread produced only with Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker's yeast). Significant differences among pH, titratable acidity, loaf volume, crumb firmness, crust color, free amino acids, and organic acids were observed when comparing sourdough breads to the yeast-only control (p ≤ 0.05). Furthermore, bacterial diversity of sourdough starter cultures was correlated with lactic acid and free amino acid in the dough and loaf volume and crumb firmness of baked breads. No significant correlations were found between fungal diversity and measured outcomes. These data demonstrate the importance of considering sourdough starter microbiomes as an ingredient in baked goods and they contribute to quality and safety outcomes in bread production. PRACTICAL APPLICATION: Sourdough starter cultures have diverse and dynamic populations of bacteria and yeasts, which contribute to the production of bread products. These populations can influence the physical and chemical properties of sourdough fermentation and final breads. Understanding of the relationship between sourdough starter microbiomes and bread quality parameters can lead to targeted development of sourdough bread products with specific physical and chemical properties.

Genomic, transcriptomic, and ecological diversity of Penicillium species in cheese rind microbiomes.

Although Penicillium molds can have significant impacts on agricultural, industrial, and biomedical systems, the ecological roles of Penicillium species in many microbiomes are not well characterized. Here we utilized a collection of 35 Penicillium strains isolated from cheese rinds to broadly investigate the genomic potential for secondary metabolism in cheese-associated Penicillium species, the impact of Penicillium on bacterial community assembly, and mechanisms of Penicillium-bacteria interactions. Using antiSMASH, we identified 1558 biosynthetic gene clusters, 406 of which were mapped to known pathways, including several mycotoxins and antimicrobial compounds. By measuring bacterial abundance and fungal mRNA expression when culturing representative Penicillium strains with a cheese rind bacterial community, we observed divergent impacts of different Penicillium strains, from strong inhibitors of bacterial growth to those with no impact on bacterial growth or community composition. Through differential mRNA expression analyses, Penicillium strains demonstrated limited differential gene expression in response to the bacterial community. We identified a few shared responses between the eight tested Penicillium strains, primarily upregulation of nutrient metabolic pathways, but we did not identify a conserved fungal response to growth in a multispecies community. These results in tandem suggest high variation among cheese-associated Penicillium species in their ability to shape bacterial community development and highlight important ecological diversity within this iconic genus.

Death caps (Amanita phalloides) frequently establish from sexual spores, but individuals can grow large and live for more than a decade in invaded forests.

Global change is reshaping Earth's biodiversity, but the changing distributions of nonpathogenic fungi remain largely undocumented, as do mechanisms enabling invasions. The ectomycorrhizal Amanita phalloides is native to Europe and invasive in North America. Using population genetics and genomics, we sought to describe the life history traits of this successfully invading symbiotic fungus. To test whether death caps spread underground using hyphae, or aboveground using sexual spores, we mapped and genotyped mushrooms from European and US sites. Larger genetic individuals (genets) would suggest spread mediated by vegetative growth, while many small genets would suggest dispersal mediated by spores. To test whether genets are ephemeral or persistent, we also sampled from populations over time. At nearly every site and across all time points, mushrooms resolve into small genets. Individuals frequently establish from sexual spores. But at one Californian site, a single individual measuring nearly 10 m across dominated. At two Californian sites, the same genetic individuals were discovered in 2004, 2014, and 2015, suggesting single individuals (both large and small) can reproduce repeatedly over relatively long timescales. A flexible life history strategy combining both mycelial growth and spore dispersal appears to underpin the invasion of this deadly perennial ectomycorrhizal fungus.

Road Hazard Stimuli: Annotated naturalistic road videos for studying hazard detection and scene perception.

Driving requires vision, yet there is little empirical data about how vision and cognition support safe driving. It is difficult to study perception during natural driving because the experimental rigor required would be dangerous and unethical to implement on the road. The driving environment is complex, dynamic, and immensely variable, making it extremely challenging to accurately replicate in simulation. Our proposed solution is to study vision using stimuli which reflect this inherent complexity by using footage of real driving situations. To this end, we curated a set of 750 crowd-sourced video clips (434 hazard and 316 no-hazard clips), which have been spatially, temporally, and categorically annotated. These annotations describe where the hazard appears, what it is, and when it occurs. In addition, perceived dangerousness changes from moment to moment and is not a simple binary detection judgement. To capture this more granular aspect of our stimuli, we asked 48 observers to rate the perceived hazardousness of 1356 brief video clips taken from these 750 source clips on a continuous scale. These ratings span the entire scale, have high interrater agreement, and are robust to driving history. This novel stimulus set is not only useful for understanding drivers' ability to detect hazards, but is also a tool for studying dynamic scene perception and other aspects of visual function. While this stimulus set was originally designed for behavioral studies, researchers interested in other areas such as traffic safety or computer vision may also find this dataset a useful resource.

Microbiome Assembly in Fermented Foods.

For thousands of years, humans have enjoyed the novel flavors, increased shelf-life, and nutritional benefits that microbes provide in fermented foods and beverages. Recent sequencing surveys of ferments have mapped patterns of microbial diversity across space, time, and production practices. But a mechanistic understanding of how fermented food microbiomes assemble has only recently begun to emerge. Using three foods as case studies (surface-ripened cheese, sourdough starters, and fermented vegetables), we use an ecological and evolutionary framework to identify how microbial communities assemble in ferments. By combining in situ sequencing surveys with in vitro models, we are beginning to understand how dispersal, selection, diversification, and drift generate the diversity of fermented food communities. Most food producers are unaware of the ecological processes occurring in their production environments, but the theory and models of ecology and evolution can provide new approaches for managing fermented food microbiomes, from farm to ferment.

Bacterial-fungal interactions promote parallel evolution of global transcriptional regulators in a widespread Staphylococcus species.

Experimental studies of microbial evolution have largely focused on monocultures of model organisms, but most microbes live in communities where interactions with other species may impact rates and modes of evolution. Using the cheese rind model microbial community, we determined how species interactions shape the evolution of the widespread food- and animal-associated bacterium Staphylococcus xylosus. We evolved S. xylosus for 450 generations alone or in co-culture with one of three microbes: the yeast Debaryomyces hansenii, the bacterium Brevibacterium aurantiacum, and the mold Penicillium solitum. We used the frequency of colony morphology mutants (pigment and colony texture phenotypes) and whole-genome sequencing of isolates to quantify phenotypic and genomic evolution. The yeast D. hansenii strongly promoted diversification of S. xylosus. By the end of the experiment, all populations co-cultured with the yeast were dominated by pigment and colony morphology mutant phenotypes. Populations of S. xylosus grown alone, with B. aurantiacum, or with P. solitum did not evolve novel phenotypic diversity. Whole-genome sequencing of individual mutant isolates across all four treatments identified numerous unique mutations in the operons for the SigB, Agr, and WalRK global regulators, but only in the D. hansenii treatment. Phenotyping and RNA-seq experiments highlighted altered pigment and biofilm production, spreading, stress tolerance, and metabolism of S. xylosus mutants. Fitness experiments revealed antagonistic pleiotropy, where beneficial mutations that evolved in the presence of the yeast had strong negative fitness effects in other biotic environments. This work demonstrates that bacterial-fungal interactions can have long-term evolutionary consequences within multispecies microbiomes by facilitating the evolution of strain diversity.

Spatial variability in localization biases predicts crowding performance.

Visual processing varies substantially across individuals, and prior work has shown significant individual differences in fundamental processes such as spatial localization. For example, when asked to report the location of a briefly flashed target in the periphery, different observers systematically misperceive its location in an idiosyncratic manner, showing different patterns of reproduction error across visual field locations. In this study, we tested whether these individual differences may propagate to other stages of visual processing, affecting the strength of visual crowding, which depends on the spacing between objects in the periphery. We, therefore, investigated the relationship between observers' idiosyncratic biases in localization and the strength of crowding to determine whether these spatial biases limit peripheral object recognition. To examine this relationship, we measured the strength of crowding at 12 locations at 8° eccentricity, in addition to the perceived spacing between pairs of Gaussian patches at these same locations. These measurements show an association between variability in crowding strength and perceived spacing at the same visual field locations: at locations where a participant experienced stronger crowding, their perceived spacing was smaller, and vice versa. We demonstrate that spatial heterogeneity in perceived spacing affects observers' ability to recognize objects in the periphery. Our results support the idea that variability in both spatial sensitivity and bias contribute to variability in the strength of crowding and bolster the account that variability in spatial coding may propagate across multiple stages of visual processing.

Metabolomics of bacterial-fungal pairwise interactions reveal conserved molecular mechanisms.

Bacterial-fungal interactions (BFIs) can shape the structure of microbial communities, but the small molecules mediating these BFIs are often understudied. We explored various optimization steps for our microbial culture and chemical extraction protocols for bacterial-fungal co-cultures, and liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) revealed that metabolomic profiles are mainly comprised of fungi derived features, indicating that fungi are the key contributors to small molecules in BFIs. LC-inductively coupled plasma MS (LC-ICP-MS) and MS/MS based dereplication using database searching revealed the presence of several known fungal specialized metabolites and structurally related analogues in these extracts, including siderophores such as desferrichrome, desferricoprogen, and palmitoylcoprogen. Among these analogues, a novel putative coprogen analogue possessing a terminal carboxylic acid motif was identified from Scopulariopsis sp. JB370, a common cheese rind fungus, and its structure was elucidated via MS/MS fragmentation. Based on these findings, filamentous fungal species appear to be capable of producing multiple siderophores with potentially different biological roles (i.e. various affinities for different forms of iron). These findings highlight that fungal species are important contributors to microbiomes via their production of abundant specialized metabolites and that elucidating their role in complex communities should continue to be a priority.

LaeA-Regulated Fungal Traits Mediate Bacterial Community Assembly.

Potent antimicrobial metabolites are produced by filamentous fungi in pure culture, but their ecological functions in nature are often unknown. Using an antibacterial Penicillium isolate and a cheese rind microbial community, we demonstrate that a fungal specialized metabolite can regulate the diversity of bacterial communities. Inactivation of the global regulator, LaeA, resulted in the loss of antibacterial activity in the Penicillium isolate. Cheese rind bacterial communities assembled with the laeA deletion strain had significantly higher bacterial abundances than the wild-type strain. RNA-sequencing and metabolite profiling demonstrated a striking reduction in the expression and production of the natural product pseurotin in the laeA deletion strain. Inactivation of a core gene in the pseurotin biosynthetic cluster restored bacterial community composition, confirming the role of pseurotins in mediating bacterial community assembly. Our discovery demonstrates how global regulators of fungal transcription can control the assembly of bacterial communities and highlights an ecological role for a widespread class of fungal specialized metabolites. IMPORTANCE Cheese rinds are economically important microbial communities where fungi can impact food quality and aesthetics. The specific mechanisms by which fungi can regulate bacterial community assembly in cheeses, other fermented foods, and microbiomes in general are largely unknown. Our study highlights how specialized metabolites secreted by a Penicillium species can mediate cheese rind development via differential inhibition of bacterial community members. Because LaeA regulates specialized metabolites and other ecologically relevant traits in a wide range of filamentous fungi, this global regulator may have similar impacts in other fungus-dominated microbiomes.

Penicillium molds impact the transcriptome and evolution of the cheese bacterium Staphylococcus equorum.

The observation that Penicillium molds can inhibit the growth of Staphylococcus was a catalyst for the antibiotic revolution. Considerable attention has been paid to purified Penicillium metabolites that inhibit bacteria, but little is known about how Penicillium species impact the ecology and evolution of bacteria in multispecies microbial communities. Here, we investigated how four different species of Penicillium can impact global transcription and evolution of a widespread Staphylococcus species (S. equorum) using the cheese rind model microbiome. Through RNA sequencing, we identified a core transcriptional response of S. equorum against all five tested Penicillium strains, including upregulation of thiamine biosynthesis, fatty acid degradation, and amino acid metabolism as well as downregulation of genes involved in the transport of siderophores. In a 12-week evolution experiment where we co-cultured S. equorum with the same Penicillium strains, we observed surprisingly few non-synonymous mutations across S. equorum populations evolved with the Penicillium species. A mutation in a putative DHH family phosphoesterase gene only occurred in populations evolved without Penicillium and decreased the fitness of S. equorum when co-cultured with an antagonistic Penicillium strain. Our results highlight the potential for conserved mechanisms of Staphylococcus-Penicillium interactions and demonstrate how fungal biotic environments may constrain the evolution of bacterial species.IMPORTANCEFungi and bacteria are commonly found co-occurring both in natural and synthetic microbiomes, but our understanding of fungal-bacterial interactions is limited to a handful of species. Conserved mechanisms of interactions and evolutionary consequences of fungal-bacterial interactions are largely unknown. Our RNA sequencing and experimental evolution data with Penicillium species and the bacterium S. equorum demonstrate that divergent fungal species can elicit conserved transcriptional and genomic responses in co-occurring bacteria. Penicillium molds are integral to the discovery of novel antibiotics and production of certain foods. By understanding how Penicillium species affect bacteria, our work can further efforts to design and manage Penicillium-dominated microbial communities in industry and food production.

Metabolomics of bacterial-fungal pairwise interactions reveal conserved molecular mechanisms.

Bacterial-fungal interactions (BFIs) can shape the structure of microbial communities, but the small molecules mediating these BFIs are often understudied. We explored various optimization steps for our microbial culture and chemical extraction protocols for bacterial-fungal co-cultures, and liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) revealed that metabolomic profiles are mainly comprised of fungi derived features, indicating that fungi are the key contributors to small molecule mediated BFIs. LC-inductively coupled plasma MS (LC-ICP-MS) and MS/MS based dereplication using database searching revealed the presence of several known fungal specialized metabolites and structurally related analogues in these extracts, including siderophores such as desferrichrome, desferricoprogen, and palmitoylcoprogen. Among these analogues, a novel putative coprogen analogue possessing a terminal carboxylic acid motif was identified from Scopulariopsis spp. JB370, a common cheese rind fungus, and its structure was elucidated via MS/MS fragmentation. Based on these findings, filamentous fungal species appear to be capable of producing multiple siderophores with potentially different biological roles (i.e. various affinities for different forms of iron). These findings highlight that fungal species are important contributors to microbiomes via their production of abundant specialized metabolites and their role in complex communities should continue to be a priority.

Taking prevalence effects on the road: Rare hazards are often missed.

Previous work has shown that, in many visual search and detection tasks, observers frequently miss rare but important targets, like weapons in bags or abnormalities in radiological images. These prior studies of the low-prevalence effect (LPE) use static stimuli and typically permitted observers to search at will. In contrast, many real-world tasks, like looking for dangerous behavior on the road, only afford observers a brief glimpse of a complex, changing scene before they must make a decision. Can the LPE be a factor in in dynamic, time-limited moments of real driving? To test this, we developed a novel hazard-detection task that preserves much of the perceptual richness and complexity of hazard detection in the real world, while allowing for experimental control over event prevalence. Observers viewed brief video clips of road scenes recorded from dashboard cameras and reported whether they saw a hazardous event. In separate sessions, the prevalence of these events was either high (50% of videos) or low (4%). Under low prevalence, observers missed hazards at more than twice the rate observed in the high-prevalence condition. Follow-up experiments demonstrate that this elevation of miss rate at low prevalence persists when participants were allowed to correct their responses, increases as hazards become increasingly rare (down to 1% prevalence) and is resistant to simple cognitive intervention (participant prebriefing). Together, our results demonstrate that the LPE generalizes to complex perceptual decisions in dynamic natural scenes, such as driving, where observers must monitor and respond to rare hazards.

Deciphering the Microbiome: Integrating Theory, New Technologies, and Inclusive Science.

The diversity and functional significance of microbiomes have become increasingly clear through the extensive sampling of Earth's many habitats and the rapid adoption of new sequencing technologies. However, much remains unknown about what makes a "healthy" microbiome, how to restore a disrupted microbiome, and how microbiomes assemble. In December 2019, we convened a workshop that focused on how to identify potential "rules of life" that govern microbiome structure and function. This collection of mSystems Perspective pieces reflects many of the main challenges and opportunities in the field identified by both in-person and virtual workshop participants. By borrowing conceptual and theoretical approaches from other fields, including economics and philosophy, these pieces suggest new ways to dissect microbiome patterns and processes. The application of conceptual advances, including trait-based theory and community coalescence, is providing new insights on how to predict and manage microbiome diversity and function. Technological and analytical advances, including deep transfer learning, metabolic models, and advances in analytical chemistry, are helping us sift through complex systems to pinpoint mechanisms of microbiome assembly and dynamics. Integration of all of these advancements (theory, concepts, technology) across biological and spatial scales is providing dramatically improved temporal and spatial resolution of microbiome dynamics. This integrative microbiome research is happening in a new moment in science where academic institutions, scientific societies, and funding agencies must act collaboratively to support and train a diverse and inclusive community of microbiome scientists.

Normal blindness: when we Look But Fail To See.

Humans routinely miss important information that is 'right in front of our eyes', from overlooking typos in a paper to failing to see a cyclist in an intersection. Recent studies on these 'Looked But Failed To See' (LBFTS) errors point to a common mechanism underlying these failures, whether the missed item was an unexpected gorilla, the clearly defined target of a visual search, or that simple typo. We argue that normal blindness is the by-product of the limited-capacity prediction engine that is our visual system. The processes that evolved to allow us to move through the world with ease are virtually guaranteed to cause us to miss some significant stimuli, especially in important tasks like driving and medical image perception.

Microbial Diversity and Interaction Specificity in Kombucha Tea Fermentations.

Despite the popularity of kombucha tea, the distribution of different microbes across kombucha ferments and how those microbes interact within communities are not well characterized. Using metagenomics, comparative genomics, synthetic community experiments, and metabolomics, we determined the taxonomic, ecological, and functional diversity of 23 distinct kombuchas from across the United States. Shotgun metagenomic sequencing demonstrated that the bacterium Komagataeibacter rhaeticus and the yeast Brettanomyces bruxellensis were the most common microbes in the sampled kombucha communities. To determine the specificity of bacterium-yeast interactions, we experimentally quantified microbial interactions within kombucha biofilms by measuring densities of interacting species and biofilm production. In pairwise combinations of bacteria and yeast, B. bruxellensis and individual strains of Komagataeibacter spp. were sufficient to form kombucha fermentations with robust biofilms, but Zygosaccharomyces bisporus, another yeast found in kombucha, did not stimulate bacteria to produce biofilms. Profiling the spent media of both yeast species using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy suggested that the enhanced ability of B. bruxellensis to ferment and produce key metabolites in sucrose-sweetened tea may explain why it stimulates biofilm formation. Comparative genomics demonstrated that Komagataeibacter spp. with >99% genomic similarity can still have dramatic differences in biofilm production, with strong producers yielding five times more biofilm than the weakest producers. IMPORTANCE Through an integration of metagenomic and experimental approaches, our work reveals the diversity and nature of interactions among key taxa in kombucha microbiomes through the construction of synthetic microbial pairs. Manipulation of these microbes in kombucha has the potential to shape both the fermentation qualities of kombucha and the production of biofilms and is valuable for kombucha beverage producers, biofilm engineers, and synthetic ecologists.

Peripheral vision in real-world tasks: A systematic review.

Peripheral vision is fundamental for many real-world tasks, including walking, driving, and aviation. Nonetheless, there has been no effort to connect these applied literatures to research in peripheral vision in basic vision science or sports science. To close this gap, we analyzed 60 relevant papers, chosen according to objective criteria. Applied research, with its real-world time constraints, complex stimuli, and performance measures, reveals new functions of peripheral vision. Peripheral vision is used to monitor the environment (e.g., road edges, traffic signs, or malfunctioning lights), in ways that differ from basic research. Applied research uncovers new actions that one can perform solely with peripheral vision (e.g., steering a car, climbing stairs). An important use of peripheral vision is that it helps compare the position of one's body/vehicle to objects in the world. In addition, many real-world tasks require multitasking, and the fact that peripheral vision provides degraded but useful information means that tradeoffs are common in deciding whether to use peripheral vision or move one's eyes. These tradeoffs are strongly influenced by factors like expertise, age, distraction, emotional state, task importance, and what the observer already knows. These tradeoffs make it hard to infer from eye movements alone what information is gathered from peripheral vision and what tasks we can do without it. Finally, we recommend three ways in which basic, sport, and applied science can benefit each other's methodology, furthering our understanding of peripheral vision more generally.