Scene context influences gaze orientation on objects in peripheral vision

Eva Aprile (1) , Nathalie Guyader (2) , Alexia Roux-Sibilon (3) , Louise Kauffmann (1) , Carole Peyrin (1)

1 LPNC - Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition
2 GIPSA-VIBS - GIPSA - Vision and Brain Signal Processing
3 LAPSCO - Laboratoire de Psychologie Sociale et Cognitive

Peripheral vision plays a critical role during scene categorization. The rapid extraction of global features in peripheral vision would allow a rudimentary representation of the scene, known as the gist, associated with prior knowledge about regularities in the visual environment. This knowledge could then be used to rapidly categorize the scene, but also to generate predictions about objects it contains. Previous studies suggest that predictions generated from peripheral vision improve the categorization of objects in central vision. However, visual perception is a dynamic phenomenon which alternates between ocular fixations on an object of interest and saccades towards the periphery to fixate new objects of interest. The present study aims to investigate how predictions based on the scene context in peripheral vision influence gaze orientation on objects in peripheral vision. Twenty-five participants performed a go/no-go saccadic task on an object (either animal or furniture) displayed in peripheral vision (7° of eccentricity), either on the left or the right side of a central fixation. A scene background was simultaneously displayed in peripheral vision, either semantically congruent with the object (outdoor scene/animal and indoor scene/furniture) or incongruent (indoor scene/animal and outdoor scene/furniture). Participants were instructed to make a saccade towards the object belonging to a target category or maintain fixation at the center when the object belonged to the distractor category. Preliminary results showed that when the target object was absent (and thus, the distractor object was present), participants made more false alarms towards the distractor in an incongruent scene (but congruent to the target object) than a congruent one. This suggests that scene context influences gaze orientation on objects in peripheral vision. However, there was no effect of the scene congruency on saccade latencies. In future studies, the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between scene and object will be manipulated to further investigate the influence of predictions based on scene-context on gaze orientation in peripheral vision.

Mots clés: Gaze orientation; Peripheral vision; Predictive model; Saccadic task; Object categorization

Domaines: Sciences cognitives

Eva Aprile, Nathalie Guyader, Alexia Roux-Sibilon, Louise Kauffmann, Carole Peyrin. Scene context influences gaze orientation on objects in peripheral vision. Forum annuel du GDR Vision (GDR Vision 2024), Feb 2024, Grenoble (38000), France. ⟨hal-04554710⟩