Schlangen, Derrick

Most of the human visual field falls in the periphery, and peripheral processing is
important for normal visual functioning. Yet, little is known about peripheral object
recognition in naturalistic scenes and factors that modulate this ability. We propose that
a critical function of scene and object memory is in order to facilitate visual object
recognition in the periphery. In the first experiment, participants identified objects in
scenes across different levels of familiarity and contextual information within the scene.
We found that familiarity with a scene resulted in a significant increase in the distance
that objects were recognized. Furthermore, we found that a semantically consistent scene
improved the distance that object recognition is possible, supporting the notion that
contextual facilitation is possible in the periphery. In the second experiment, the preview
duration of a scene was varied in order to examine how a scene representation is built and
how memory of that scene and the objects within it contributes to object recognition in
the periphery. We found that the closer participants fixated to the object in the preview,
the farther on average they recognized that target object in the periphery. However, only a preview duration of the scenes for 5000 ms produced significantly farther peripheral
object recognition compared to not previewing the scene. Overall, these experiments
introduce a novel research paradigm for object recognition in naturalistic scenes, and
demonstrates multiple factors that have systematic effects on peripheral object
recognition.

Across three experiments, we assessed how location and color information contributes to the identification of an object whose image has been degraded, making its identity ambiguous. In Experiment 1, some of the target objects had fixed locations within the scene. We found that subjects used this location information during search and later to identify the blurred target objects. In Experiment 2, we tested whether location and color information can be combined to identify degraded objects, and results were inconclusive. In Experiment 3, both the location and color of each object was variable but statistically predictive of the object's identity. We found that subjects used both sources of information-color and location - equally when identifying the blurred image of the object. Overall, these findings suggest that location information may be as determining as intrinsic feature information to identify objects when the objects' intrinsic features are degraded.