Late disruption of central visual field disrupts peripheral perception of form and color

Abstract

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.

A review of interactions between peripheral and foveal vision

“…Feedback signals from higher to lower areas are necessary for “vision with scrutiny.” This slower route provides information about low level features, such as color, orientation, shape, etc. The graded effect of foveal feedback ( Fan et al, 2016 ; Yu & Shim, 2016 ; Ramezani et al, 2019 ; Weldon et al, 2020 ) is consistent with these assumptions of the reverse hierarchy theory.…”

“…Peripheral orientation discrimination of gratings is less modulated by delayed foveal stimuli than peripheral object discrimination ( Yu & Shim, 2016 ). Similarly, shape discrimination is more heavily impaired by delayed foveal distraction than color discrimination ( Weldon, Woolgar, Rich, & Williams, 2020 ). As mentioned above, object recognition for blurred objects is not impaired ( Fan et al, 2016 ), suggesting that foveal feedback is only relevant for, or involved in, the analysis of fine spatial details.…”

Foveal vision predictively sensitizes to defining features of eye movement targets

“…Taking saccade endpoints into account reduced the spatial specificity of congruency effects (see Supplements). Third, foveal retinotopic cortex contributes to the processing of complex peripheral shapes [9][10][11][12][13] . Whether feature-based attention can operate at this level of abstraction, and whether the proposed mechanism is viable for naturalistic objects involving feature conjunctions, is unclear.…”

“…Evidence from neuroimaging [9,10] , brain stimulation [11] and psychophysics [10,12,13] suggests that during fixation, the fovea contributes to the processing of stimuli presented in the periphery: using functional magnetic resonance imaging, Williams et al (2008) and Fan et al (2016) demonstrate that relevant peripheral objects are represented in foveal retinotopic cortex, possibly via feedback connections from temporal areas [14,15] . Foveal cortex thus seems to be recruited for tasks requiring high perceptual scrutiny – even when the respective stimulus appears far outside any foveal neuron’s receptive field.…”

“…Foveal cortex thus seems to be recruited for tasks requiring high perceptual scrutiny – even when the respective stimulus appears far outside any foveal neuron’s receptive field. Indeed, disrupting foveal processing through transcranial magnetic stimulation [11] or the presentation of a foveal distractor [10,13] impairs peripheral discrimination performance. Foveal feedback, so far characterized during fixation, gains a predictive nature when applied to active vision [9,11] : already before an eye movement, critical features of the peripheral target should be available for foveal processing.…”