Abstract
Eye movements are needed to bring objects from the periphery to the fovea so that visual details can be resolved. What information about an object is maintained and integrated across a saccade? In the parafoveal preview paradigm, participants direct their eyes to a peripherally presented object that is replaced during the saccade with a to-be-named target object. Preview benefit is the difference in naming latency when the preview and target object is similar versus dissimilar. The present study determined the relative contribution of visual information versus identity and name priming in the generation of preview benefits using full-color pictures of real-world objects and a nonrepeating stimulus set. Previews and targets were from the same basic-level category and viewpoint but varied in visual similarity. Preview benefits were observed for identical, visually similar, and visually dissimilar previews compared to meaningless-object and different-object controls. These effects were observed despite the fact that items were not repeated. The magnitude of the preview benefits did not differ between preview conditions, suggesting that the visual component is abstracted away from surface-level features. A second experiment measured object identification from the peripheral preview alone. An items-based analysis then examined the preview benefits in Experiment 1 as a function of the proportion of trials the item was correctly identified in Experiment 2. Preview benefits increased as items were more readily identified in the periphery, but parafoveal identification explained only 10% of the preview benefit variance. Preview benefits also emerged for items that were correctly identified in the periphery by only 20% of the participants. The results suggest that identity and name priming play a minor role in the generation of preview benefits in this context, and that the majority of the effect is driven by activation at the level of abstract visual object descriptions.
This work supported by the National Science Foundation (BCS-0094433 and ECS-9873531), NSF-IGERT (DGE011-4378), and the Army Research Office (W911NF-04-1-0078).