Visual space is retinotopically mapped such that peripheral objects are processed in a cortical region outside the region that represents central vision. Despite this well-known fact, neuroimaging studies have found information about peripheral objects in the foveal confluence, the cortical region representing the fovea. Further, this information is behaviorally relevant: disrupting the foveal confluence using transcranial magnetic stimulation impairs discrimination of peripheral objects at time-points consistent with a disruption of feedback. If the foveal confluence receives feedback of information about peripheral objects to boost vision, there should be behavioral consequences of this phenomenon. Here, we tested the effect of foveal distractors at different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) on discrimination of peripheral targets. Participants performed a discrimination task on target objects presented in the periphery while fixating centrally. A visual distractor presented at the fovea ~100 ms after presentation of the targets disrupted performance more than a central distractor presented at other SOAs. This was specific to a central distractor; a peripheral distractor at the same time point did not have the same effect. These results are consistent with the claim that foveal retinotopic cortex is recruited for extra-foveal perception. This study describes a new paradigm for investigating the nature of the foveal feedback phenomenon and demonstrates the importance of this feedback in peripheral vision.

Evidence from neuroimaging and brain stimulation studies suggest that visual information about objects in the periphery is fed back to foveal retinotopic cortex in a separate representation that is essential for peripheral perception. The characteristics of this phenomenon have important theoretical implications for the role fovea-specific feedback might play in perception. In this work, we employed a recently developed behavioral paradigm to explore whether late disruption to central visual space impaired perception of color. In the first experiment, participants performed a shape discrimination task on colored novel objects in the periphery while fixating centrally. Consistent with the results from previous work, a visual distractor presented at fixation~100ms after presentation of the peripheral stimuli impaired sensitivity to differences in peripheral shapes more than a visual distractor presented at other stimulus onset asynchronies. In a second experiment, participants performed a color discrimination task on the same colored objects. In a third experiment, we further tested for this foveal distractor effect with stimuli restricted to a low-level feature by using homogenous color patches. These two latter experiments resulted in a similar pattern of behavior: a central distractor presented at the critical stimulus onset asynchrony impaired sensitivity to peripheral color differences, but, importantly, the magnitude of the effect was stronger when peripheral objects contained complex shape information. These results show a behavioral effect consistent with disrupting feedback to the fovea, in line with the foveal feedback suggested by previous neuroimaging studies.