Familiar object benefit more from transsaccadic feature predictions

The transsaccadic feature prediction mechanism associates peripheral and foveal information
belonging to the same object to make predictions about how an object seen in the periphery
would appear in the fovea or vice versa. It is unclear if such transsaccadic predictions require
experience with the object such that only familiar objects benefit from this mechanism by virtue
of having peripheral-foveal associations. In two experiments, we tested whether familiar
objects have an advantage over novel objects in peripheral-foveal matching and transsaccadic
change detection tasks.
In both experiments, observers were unknowingly familiarized with a small set of stimuli by
completing a sham orientation change detection task. In the first experiment, observers
subsequently performed a peripheral-foveal matching task, where they needed to pick the
foveal test object that matched a briefly presented peripheral target. In the second experiment,
observers subsequently performed a transsaccadic object change detection task where a
peripheral target was exchanged or not exchanged with another target after the saccade, either
immediately or after a 300 ms blank period.
We found an advantage of familiar objects over novel objects in both experiments. While
foveal-peripheral associations explained the familiarity effect in the matching task of the first
experiment, the second experiment provided evidence for the advantage of peripheral-foveal
associations in transsaccadic object change detection. Introducing a postsaccadic blank
improved the change detection performance in general but more for familiar than for novel
objects. We conclude that familiar objects benefit from additional object-specific predictions.
Keywords: Saccades, Transsaccadic prediction, perceptual learning, object recognition,
visual stability.