Abstract
Visual perception is based on information processing during periods of eye fixations that are interrupted by fast saccadic eye movements. The ability to sample and relate information on task-relevant objects across fixations implies that correspondence between presaccadic and postsaccadic objects is established. Postsaccadic object information usually updates and overwrites information on the corresponding presaccadic object. The presaccadic object representation is then lost. In contrast, the presaccadic object is conserved when object correspondence is broken. This helps transsaccadic memory but it may impose attentional costs on object recognition. Therefore, we investigated how breaking object correspondence across the saccade affects postsaccadic object recognition. In Experiment 1, object correspondence was broken by a brief postsaccadic blank screen. Observers made a saccade to a peripheral object which was displaced during the saccade. This object reappeared either immediately after the saccade or after the blank screen. Within the postsaccadic object, a letter was briefly presented (terminated by a mask). Observers reported displacement direction and letter identity in different blocks. Breaking object correspondence by blanking improved displacement identification but deteriorated postsaccadic letter recognition. In Experiment 2, object correspondence was broken by changing the object’s contrast-polarity. There were no object displacements and observers only reported letter identity. Again, breaking object correspondence deteriorated postsaccadic letter recognition. These findings identify transsaccadic object correspondence as a key determinant of object recognition across the saccade. This is in line with the recent hypothesis that breaking object correspondence results in separate representations of presaccadic and postsaccadic objects which then compete for limited attentional processing resources (Schneider, 2013). Postsaccadic object recognition is then deteriorated because less resources are available for processing postsaccadic objects.
Highlights
Accurate vision is spatially and temporally limited
The low resolution in the retinal periphery places a fundamental constraint on the visual exploration of the world: To view a potentially interesting object in the periphery with high acuity, Object Correspondence and Object Recognition one must bring it onto the fovea by making a fast saccadic eye movement
Trials were excluded from the analyses, if no saccade was made until 400 ms after onset of the saccade target object, saccade latency was below 100 ms, or the saccade target object was missed by more than 2.5◦
Summary
Accurate vision is spatially and temporally limited. Spatially, it is limited to the fovea, the center part of the eye’s retina which provides the highest visual resolution (e.g., Findlay and Gilchrist, 2003). Coping with most natural tasks demonstrates that humans sample and relate information on task-relevant objects across eye movements (Land and Tatler, 2009; Schneider, 2013). This implies that the visual system assesses object correspondence across fixations (Hollingworth et al, 2008; called object continuity, Schneider, 2013), it assesses whether input from postsaccadic and presaccadic objects (apparently) comes from the same external object (Kahneman et al, 1992; Irwin and Andrews, 1996). Object correspondence is a prerequisite for updating presaccadic low-quality information on a peripheral object with postsaccadic foveal information on the same object (Henderson and Anes, 1994; Demeyer et al, 2009; Herwig and Schneider, 2014)
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