Peripheral scene context modulates task-driven saccades toward peripheral objects

Peripheral vision plays a crucial role in visual recognition, with previous studies suggesting that cognitive predictions derived from peripheral input enhance object categorization in central vision during single eye-fixation. However, visual perception is dynamic, alternating between ocular fixations and saccades to new objects of interest. In three eye-tracking experiments, we explored how task-relevant predictions extracted from the peripheral scene context influence the gaze-based discrimination of target objects in peripheral vision. We presented both an object and a scene in peripheral vision and instructed participants to saccade toward the object if it belonged to a predefined target category, or to maintain central fixation if it did not. We manipulated the semantic congruence between the peripheral scene and the target category, and we measured its effect on saccades. Across the three experiments, the results consistently showed that a scene congruent with the target category triggered erroneous saccades toward the distractor object. Experiment 2 revealed that the congruence effect was amplified when the scene was presented before the object, suggesting that the accumulation of information about the peripheral scene contributed to generating predictions and thus increased the likelihood of saccades toward the peripheral object. Experiment 3 further clarified that scene context alone did not account for the erroneous saccades observed in previous experiments, and that these responses reflect the combined influence of scene context and object presence. This study demonstrated that the peripheral scene context, although irrelevant to the task, was automatically processed and used to form predictions that trigger saccades toward expected objects in peripheral vision.