Heterogeneity in Category Recognition across the Visual Field

Visual information emerging from the extrafoveal locations is important for visual search, saccadic eye movement control, and spatial attention allocation. Our everyday sensory experience with visual object categories varies across different parts of the visual field which may result in location-contingent variations in visual object recognition. We used a body, animal body, and chair two-forced choice object category recognition task to investigate this possibility. Animal body and chair images with various levels of visual ambiguity were presented at the fovea and different extrafoveal locations across the vertical and horizontal meridians. We found heterogeneous body and chair category recognition across the visual field. Specifically, while the recognition performance of the body and chair presented at the fovea were similar, it varied across different extrafoveal locations. The largest difference was observed when the body and chair images were presented at the lower-left and upper-right visual fields, respectively. The lower/upper visual field bias of the body/chair recognition was particularly observed in low/high stimulus visual signals. Finally, when subjects' performances were adjusted for a potential location-contingent decision bias in category recognition by subtracting the category detection in full noise condition, location-dependent category recognition was observed only for the body category. These results suggest heterogeneous body recognition bias across the visual field potentially due to more frequent exposure of the lower visual field to body stimuli.