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

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Woolgar, Alexandra 
Rich, Anina N 
Williams, Mark A 

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.

Description

Keywords

Adolescent, Adult, Attention, Color, Color Perception, Feedback, Physiological, Female, Fovea Centralis, Humans, Male, Pattern Recognition, Visual, Photic Stimulation, Visual Cortex, Visual Fields

Journal Title

PLoS One

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1932-6203
1932-6203

Volume Title

15

Publisher

Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Sponsorship
Medical Research Council (MC_UU_00005/17)