Peripheral scene context influences the saccade toward an object in peripheral vision

Peripheral vision plays a crucial role in visual recognition, with previous studies suggesting that cognitive predictions from peripheral vision enhance object categorization in central vision during single eye-fixation. However, visual recognition is dynamic, alternating between ocular fixations and saccades to new objects of interest. In three eye-tracking experiments, we explored how predictions extracted from the peripheral scene context influence the gaze-based detection of target objects in peripheral vision. We presented both an object and a scene in peripheral vision and instructed participants to make a 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 visual system accumulation of information about the peripheral scene contributed to generating predictions and thus more saccades towards the peripheral object. Experiment 3 confirmed that this effect was not due to a visual grasp reflex and that the response was based on the integrative processing of the object within the scene. 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.