Peripheral and central sensation: multisensory orienting and recognition across species

Vision includes looking and seeing. Looking, mainly via gaze shifts, selects a fraction of visual input information for passage through the brain's information bottleneck. The selected input is placed within the attentional spotlight, typically in the central visual field. Seeing decodes, i.e., recognizes and discriminates, the selected inputs. Hence, peripheral vision should be mainly devoted to looking, in particular, deciding where to shift the gaze. Looking is often guided exogenously by a saliency map created by the primary visual cortex (V1), and can be effective with no seeing and limited awareness. In seeing, peripheral vision not only suffers from poor spatial resolution, but is also subject to crowding and is more vulnerable to illusions by misleading, ambiguous, and impoverished visual inputs. Central vision, mainly for seeing, enjoys the top-down feedback that aids seeing in light of the bottleneck which is hypothesized to starts from V1 to higher areas. This feedback queries for additional information from lower visual cortical areas such as V1 for ongoing recognition. Peripheral vision is deficient in this feedback according to the Central-peripheral Dichotomy (CPD) theory. The saccades engendered by peripheral vision allows looking to combine with seeing to give human observers the impression of seeing the whole scene clearly despite inattentional blindness. 

Peripheral vision is mainly for looking rather than seeing

Two main hypotheses regarding the directional flow of visual information processing in the brain have been proposed: feed-forward (bottom-up) and re-entrant (top-down). Early theories espoused feed-forward principles in which processing was said to advance from simple to increasingly complex attributes terminating at a higher area where conscious perceptions occur. That view is disconfirmed by advances in neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, which implicate re-entrant two-way signaling as the predominant form of communication between brain regions. With some notable exceptions, the notion of re-entrant processing has had a relatively modest effect on computational models of perception and cognition, which continue to be predominantly based on feed-forward or within-level re-entrant principles. In the present work we describe five sets of empirical findings that defy interpretation in terms of feed-forward or within-level re-entrant principles. We conclude by urging the adoption of psychophysical, biological, and computational models based on cross-level iterative re-entrant principles. 

Need for cross-level iterative re-entry in models of visual processing.

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Trans-Saccadic Integration for Object Recognition Peters Out with Pre-Saccadic Object Eccentricity as Target-Directed Saccades Become More Saliency-Driven

Most vision labs have had to replace the formerly dominant CRT screens with LCDs and several studies have investigated whether changing the display type leads to changes in perceptual phenomena, since fundamental properties of the stimulation, e.g., the transition time between frames, differ between these different display technologies. While many phenomena have proven robust, Kihara et al. (2010) reported different metacontrast masking functions on LCDs compared to CRTs. This difference poses a challenge for the integration of new LCD-based findings with the established knowledge from studies with CRTs and requires theoretical accounts that consider the effects of different display types. However, before further conclusions can be drawn, the basic findings should be secured. Therefore, we tried to reproduce the display type effect by comparing metacontrast masking on an LCD and a CRT in two experiments. Our approach differs from the previous study by increasing the power and reliability of the measurements and carefully matching the two display types. In addition to display type, we varied target-mask stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) and stimulus-background polarity. Regardless of display type and polarity, we found the typical type-B masking functions. Evidence for a SOA-dependent display type effect in the black-on-white polarity condition from Experiment 1 was not replicated in Experiment 2. Overall, the results indicate that metacontrast masking effects on objective and subjective measurements, i.e., discriminatory sensitivity and phenomenological reports, do not vary significantly with display technologies. This lack of display effects is discussed in the context of current theories of metacontrast masking. 

Metacontrast masking does not change with different display technologies: A comparison of CRT and LCD monitors

According to the central-peripheral dichotomy (CPD), feedback from higher to lower cortical areas along the visual pathway to aid recognition is weaker in the more peripheral visual field. Metacontrast masking is predominantly a reduced visibility of a brief target by a brief and spatially adjacent mask when the mask succeeds rather than precedes or coincides with the target. If this masking works mainly by interfering with the feedback mechanisms for target recognition, then, by the CPD, this masking should be weaker at more peripheral visual locations. We extended the metacontrast masking at fovea by Enns and Di Lollo to visual field eccentricities 1 ∘ , 3 ∘ , and 9 ∘ . Relative to the target’s onset, the mask appeared at a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of − 50 , 0, 50, 92, or 142 milliseconds (ms). Enlarged stimuli were used for larger eccentricities to equalize target discrimination performance across eccentricities as best as possible for zero SOA and when SOA was too long for substantial masking. At each eccentricity, the masking was weakest at 0 or − 50  ms SOA, strongest at 50 ms SOA, and weakened with larger (positive) SOAs. Consistent with the CPD, larger eccentricities presented weaker maskings at all nonzero, and particularly the positive, SOAs.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/03010066221108281

The central-peripheral dichotomy and metacontrast masking

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The central-peripheral dichotomy and metacontrast masking