HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.
The spatial resolution of the human visual field decreases considerably from the center to the periphery. However, several studies have highlighted the importance of peripheral vision for scene categorization. In Experiment 1, we investigated if peripheral vision could influence the scene categorization in central vision. We used photographs of indoor and outdoor scenes from which we extracted a central disk and a peripheral ring. Stimuli were composed of a central disk and a peripheral ring that could be either semantically congruent or incongruent. Participants had to categorize the central disk while ignoring the peripheral ring or the peripheral ring while ignoring the central disk. Results revealed a congruence effect of peripheral vision on central vision, as strong as the reverse. In Experiment 2, we investigated the nature of the physical signal in peripheral vision that influences the categorization in central vision. We used either intact, phase-preserved, or amplitude-preserved peripheral rings. Participants had to categorize the central disk while ignoring the peripheral ring. Results showed that only phase-preserved peripheral rings elicited a congruence effect as strong as the one observed with intact peripheral rings. Information contained in the phase spectrum (spatial configuration of the scene) may be critical in peripheral vision.
We have no known conflict of interest to disclose. This study was not preregistered but stimuli, executable files of the experiment, data and analysis scripts are available in the Open Science Framework repository at https://osf.io/d65zs/.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.