Abstract

With recent advances in display technology, there is a growing trend in using a large screen divided into multiple windows or connecting multiple displays to use them together. In such scenarios, the screen can be divided into task-relevant and task-irrelevant windows, allowing selective reduction of the refresh rate in the latter to enhance energy efficiency. However, whether the decrease in the refresh rate in the task-irrelevant window affects task performance in the task-relevant window remains unknown. Here, in two experiments, we adopted critical flicker-fusion frequency (CFF) measurement and image quality degradation detection tasks to investigate the impact of reducing the refresh rate of the task-irrelevant window on the temporal and spatial resolution in the task-relevant window. We found that the refresh rate reduction of the task-irrelevant window affected the temporal, but not the spatial resolution of the task-relevant window. These results suggest that the nature of the current task in the task-relevant window must be considered if the refresh rate in the task-irrelevant window is to be reduced in real-world display usage scenarios.