Abstract
Levy and her colleagues (2001) found face-selective regions were more activated when faces were presented in the central field than in the peripheral field, while opposite trend was found for place-selective regions. However, because they did not investigate behavioral consequences of this center-periphery organization, we investigated whether this organization influenced performance in working memory tasks depending on object categories. In Experiment 1, participants performed a change detection task. Stimuli were presented in 2.5°∼4.5° in the center condition, and in 11.5°∼20° in the periphery condition. In each trial, either 2, 3, or 5 faces or buildings were simultaneously presented for 500 ms. After 1 sec delay, the test display was presented. In this display, single object could change into another object in half of the trials. Participants reported whether one of objects had changed. We found d-prime of face-change detection decreased in the periphery condition, whereas d-prime of building-change detection increased, as the task became more difficult. Furthermore, when faces were presented in the periphery, participants used more conservative criteria than in the central field. However, the opposite pattern was observed for buildings. In Experiment 2, we used a serial memory scan task and added the fovea condition (1.8°). In each trial, the RSVP stream, which consisted of 4 faces or buildings with 2 irrelevant objects, was presented. Each object was presented for 200 ms with 100 ms of ISI. After a delay of 1 sec, a target appeared. Participants reported whether the target was in the RSVP stream. The results showed that d-prime of face-search task decreased with eccentricities, whereas that of building-search task did not change. These results suggest that working memory for faces is better in central vision and working memory for buildings is better in peripheral vision, which is consistent with Levy et al. (2001)'s findings.
This research was supported by the Converging Research Center Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (2010-0029270).