What determines location specificity or generalization of transsaccadic learning?

Abstract

Humans incorporate knowledge of transsaccadic associations into peripheral object perception. Several studies have shown that learning of new manipulated transsaccadic associations leads to a presaccadic perceptual bias. However, there was still disagreement whether this learning effect was location specific (Herwig, Weiß, & Schneider, 2018) or generalizes to new locations (Valsecchi & Gegenfurtner, 2016). The current study investigated under what conditions location generalization of transsaccadic learning occurs. In all experiments, there were acquisition phases in which the spatial frequency (Experiment 1) or the size (Experiment 2 and 3) of objects was changed transsaccadically. In the test phases, participants judged the respective feature of peripheral objects. These could appear either at the location where learning had taken place or at new locations. All experiments replicated the perceptual bias effect at the old learning locations. In two experiments, transsaccadic learning remained location specific even when learning occurred at multiple locations (Experiment 1) or with the feature of size (Experiment 2) for which a transfer had previously been shown. Only in Experiment 3 was a transfer of the learning effect to new locations observable. Here, learning only took place for one object and not for several objects that had to be discriminated. Therefore, one can conclude that, when specific associations are learned for multiple objects, transsaccadic learning stays location specific and when a transsaccadic association is learned for only one object it allows a generalization to other locations.