Foveal feedback supports peripheral perception of both object color and form

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 has 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. First, 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 the 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 depended on whether peripheral objects contained complex shape information. These results taken together suggest that feedback to the foveal confluence is a component of visual processing supporting perception of both object form and color.