Familiar objects benefit more from transsaccadic feature predictions.

Abstract

The transsaccadic feature prediction mechanism associates peripheral and foveal information belonging to the same object to make predictions about how an object seen in the periphery would appear in the fovea or vice versa. It is unclear if such transsaccadic predictions require experience with the object such that only familiar objects benefit from this mechanism by virtue of having peripheral-foveal associations. In two experiments, we tested whether familiar objects have an advantage over novel objects in peripheral-foveal matching and transsaccadic change detection tasks. In both experiments, observers were unknowingly familiarized with a small set of stimuli by completing a sham orientation change detection task. In the first experiment, observers subsequently performed a peripheral-foveal matching task, where they needed to pick the foveal test object that matched a briefly presented peripheral target. In the second experiment, observers subsequently performed a transsaccadic object change detection task where a peripheral target was exchanged or not exchanged with another target after the saccade, either immediately or after a 300-ms blank period. We found an advantage of familiar objects over novel objects in both experiments. While foveal-peripheral associations explained the familiarity effect in the matching task of the first experiment, the second experiment provided evidence for the advantage of peripheral-foveal associations in transsaccadic object change detection. Introducing a postsaccadic blank improved change detection performance in general but more for familiar than for novel objects. We conclude that familiar objects benefit from additional object-specific predictions.