Abstract
Since perceptual and neural face sensitivity is associated with a foveal bias, and neural place sensitivity is associated with a peripheral bias (integration over space), we hypothesized that face perception ability will decline more with eccentricity than place perception ability. We also wanted to examine whether face perception ability would show a left visual field (LeVF) bias due to earlier reports suggesting right hemisphere dominance for faces, or would show an upper or lower visual field bias. Participants performed foveal and parafoveal face and house discrimination tasks for upright or inverted stimuli (≤4°) while their eye movements were monitored. Low-level visual tasks were also measured. The eccentricity-related accuracy reductions were evident for all categories. Through detailed analyses we found (i) a robust face inversion effect across the parafovea, while for houses an opposite effect was found, (ii) higher eccentricity-related sensitivity for face performance than for house performance (via inverted vs. upright within-category eccentricity-driven reductions), (iii) within-category but not across-category performance associations across eccentricities, and (iv) no hemifield biases. Our central to parafoveal investigations suggest that high-level vision processing may be reflected in behavioural performance.
Highlights
Since perceptual and neural face sensitivity is associated with a foveal bias, and neural place sensitivity is associated with a peripheral bias, we hypothesized that face perception ability will decline more with eccentricity than place perception ability
Reasoning that neural coding preferences likely reflect behavioural performance, and based on earlier studies and on reduced visual performance at peripheral locations[6], we hypothesized that face related tasks, that are associated with a cortical foveal bias would show reduced performance in more peripheral locations relative to house related tasks that are associated with a cortical peripheral bias
In line with the eccentricity expected reductions in performance, we found that for all visual categories accuracy and d-prime were highest at the centre of the visual field and dropped significantly as eccentricity increased
Summary
Since perceptual and neural face sensitivity is associated with a foveal bias, and neural place sensitivity is associated with a peripheral bias (integration over space), we hypothesized that face perception ability will decline more with eccentricity than place perception ability. Due to the evident VF biases in scene/place-related regions in pRF studies (UVF bias in ventral PPA and LoVF bias in dorsal TOS43), we hypothesized that there may be an UVF vs LoVF difference in house performance To test these hypotheses we measured face and house discrimination performance for upright and inverted stimuli at foveal to parafoveal locations (up to 4°, see Fig. 1b–e) in each of the four visual field quadrants in a group of normally sighted individuals while participants held fixation and their eye movements were being monitored. We reasoned that if category-related performance relies on category-specific mechanisms we should expect that despite the eccentricity-related reductions in performance, performance across eccentricities would be correlated for a specific category, but not across categories
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