In this article, we investigate how scene-gist recognition interacts with eccentricity. The involvement of foveal vision (<1°), parafoveal vision (1°–5°) and peripheral vision (>5°) in scene-gist recognition has been addressed in several studies. For example, Van Diepen, De Graef, Lamote, and Van Wijnendaele (
1994) have shown that scene recognition was only slightly degraded when the foveal information was masked with noise. Expanding on this earlier work, Larson and Loschky (
2009) and Larson, Freeman, Ringer, and Loschky (
2014) examined the contribution of combined foveal and parafoveal vision (hereafter referred to as
central vision) to scene categorization, using the window-and-scotoma paradigm. In this paradigm, the window reveals the central part of the image and blocks peripheral information, whereas the scotoma blocks the central part and reveals only peripheral information. These studies found that scene-categorization performance was practically unaffected when central vision was blocked, whereas blocking peripheral information caused a serious decrease in performance. However, when the dramatic differences in visual content between the two conditions were accounted for, central vision appeared to outperform peripheral vision on a pixel-by-pixel basis (Larson & Loschky,
2009). Furthermore, human observers performed more accurately with central vision for shorter processing times, whereas peripheral vision provided sufficient information only at longer processing times (Larson et al.,
2014). Recent studies have confirmed this central advantage, with identical stimuli presented at different eccentricities (Boucart, Moroni, Thibaut, Szaffarczyk, & Greene,
2013; Thibaut, Tran, Szaffarczyk, & Boucart,
2014). Remarkably, however, scene-categorization performance in those studies remained well above chance up to the furthest eccentricity tested (70°), which is in line with the high performance of individuals with central-vision loss due to age-related macular degeneration (Thibaut et al.,
2014; Tran, Rambaud, Despretz, & Boucart,
2010).