Associating peripheral and foveal visual input across saccades: A default mode of the human visual system?

Spatial processing resolution of a particular object in the visual field can differ considerably due to eye movements. The same object will be represented with high acuity in the fovea but only coarsely in periphery. Herwig and Schneider (in press) proposed that the visual system counteracts such resolution differences by predicting, based on previous experience, how foveal objects will look in the periphery and vice versa. They demonstrated that previously learned transsaccadic associations between peripheral and foveal object information facilitate performance in visual search, irrespective of the correctness of these associations. False associations were learned by replacing the presaccadic object with a slightly different object during the saccade. Importantly, participants usually did not notice this object change. This raises the question of whether perception of object continuity is a critical factor in building transsaccadic associations. We disturbed object continuity during learning with a postsaccadic blank or a task-irrelevant shape change. Interestingly, visual search performance revealed that neither disruption of temporal object continuity (blank) nor disruption of spatial object continuity (shape change) impaired transsaccadic learning. Thus, transsaccadic learning seems to be a very robust default mechanism of the visual system that is probably related to the more general concept of action-effect learning.