When chromatic and/or achromatic discrimination tasks were performed in central and peripheral visual fields in a dual-task paradigm, performance reduction was observed for the peripheral task, and degree of its reduction depended on combination of colors between the central and peripheral stimuli (Uchikawa et al., 2014). On the other hand, when the observer performed a pattern discrimination task using a dual-ring pattern in the central visual field, the color of the central pattern did not affect the peripheral performance (Sato et al., 2014). In the present study the first experiment was repeated using the dual-ring pattern for the central target to confirm that the importance of color combination was due to the central task itself, but not to the central pattern. The results were consistent with the previous experiments and positive to the hypothesis, i.e. those showed that threshold elevation was significantly larger when chromatic and achromatic discrimination tasks were combined than when both central and peripheral tasks were chromatic or achromatic. It appears that it is difficult to pay visual attention to chromatic and achromatic targets simultaneously.
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