Abstract
Humans use saccades to sample information from the world with foveal vision by fixating objects and areas of interest. The world, however, is not static, so representations of objects must be updated over time as changes occur. Foveal vision has higher acuity and reliability than peripheral vision, which is also more susceptible to phenomena such as change blindness: given this inequality, how much does peripheral vision contribute to updating object representations across sequences of saccades? Is visual awareness based on potentially outdated information at the time of object fixation, or is awareness updated based on more recent, but less reliable peripheral information? This study tested whether the representation of a rotating object was updated based on peripheral information, or whether it was based purely on the foveal view of the object, and whether the predictability of object rotation affected updating. We presented participants with four real-world objects, presented at random orientations from 360º of possible viewpoints. Participants were instructed to fixate each object in a set order, for a fixed duration. With each saccade, each object rotated either in a consecutive manner, or to a random viewpoint. Participants were then asked to make a perceptual report by rotating a randomly presented object to match the viewpoint they remembered. We correlated perceptual reports to each of the shown orientations to determine the contribution of peripheral and foveal orientations. Results showed that when objects rotated to random, non-consecutive viewpoints, participants reported the foveally-viewed orientation; however, when objects rotated in a continuous manner, participants were more likely to report more recent, peripherally-viewed orientations, depending on object eccentricity. This suggests that peripheral information is used to update perceptual representations when peripherally-viewed changes are consistent with a systematic change in the world. Peripheral information may be processed, but filtered, and only accessed under specific circumstances.