TY - JOUR T1 - Face discrimination does not outperform house discrimination at foveal to parafoveal locations JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/807099 SP - 807099 AU - Olga Kreichman AU - Sharon Gilaie-Dotan Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/10/22/807099.abstract N2 - Since perceptual and neural face sensitivity is associated with a foveal bias, and neural place sensitivity is associated with a peripheral bias (integration over space), we hypothesized that face perception ability will decline more with eccentricity than place perception ability. We also hypothesized that face perception ability may show an upper visual field (UVF) bias due to the proximity of face-related regions to UVF retinotopic representations, and a left visual field (LeVF) bias due to earlier reports suggesting right hemisphere dominance for faces. Participants performed fovea and parafoveal face discrimination tasks (≤ 4°) while their eye movements were monitored. Additional within-category discrimination performance was measured for houses, inverted faces, shapes and low-level visual acuity. While, as expected, eccentricity-related accuracy reductions were evident for all categories, in contrast to our hypothesis, there was no significant difference between face and house-related accuracy. Furthermore, RTs for houses were significantly faster than for faces at all locations including the fovea. Significant LeVF bias was evident for upright and inverted faces, and face inversion effect was found at all parafoveal eccentricities. Our results suggest that low-level and possibly top-down factors, and not only the face-fovea place-peripheral associations found in high-level visual cortex, influence perceptual performance. ER -