As an important factor for central vision preview, peripheral vision is a crucial ability for most ball game players in motion detection. A critical problem with peripheral vision is object recognition which has not yet been given much attention. This paper presents an experimental study to evaluate the influence on object recognition in peripheral vision due to different patterns, colors and shapes of the objects. More specifically, four types of shapes (including circles, triangles, horizontal stripes and vertical stripes) with various colors presented in different patterns were applied during the peripheral vision test. The results show that different patterns and colors indeed affect object recognition in peripheral vision in terms of accuracy and response time, while different types of shapes do not vary the performance significantly. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.