Familiar object benefit more from transsaccadic feature predictions

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