Peripheral pooling is tuned to the localization task

The human visual system exhibits substantially different properties between foveal and peripheral vision. Peripheral vision is special in that it has to compress data onto fewer units by reduced visual acuity and larger receptive fields, yielding greatly reduced performance on many tasks such as object recognition. However, here we show that the pooling operations implemented by peripheral vision provide exactly the invariance properties required by a self-localization task. We test the effect of different pooling sizes, as well as acuity reduction, on localization, object recognition, and scene categorization tasks. We find that peripheral pooling, but not reduced acuity, affects localization performance positively, whereas it is detrimental to object recognition performance.