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Is visual perception “rich” or “sparse?” One finding supporting the “rich” hypothesis shows that a specific visual summary representation, color diversity, is represented “cost-free” outside focally-attended regions in dual-task paradigms [1]. Here, we investigated whether this “cost-free” phenomenon for color diversity perception extends to peripheral vision. After replicating previous findings and verifying that color diversity is represented “cost-free” in central vision, we performed two experiments: in our first experiment, we extended the paradigm to peripheral vision and found that in minimally-attended regions of space, color diversity perception was impaired. In a second and final experiment, we added confidence judgments to our task, and found that participants maintained high levels of metacognitive awareness of impaired performance in minimally-attended visual areas in the periphery. These findings provide evidence that color perception may be partially attention-dependent in peripheral vision, and challenge previous views on both sides of the rich vs. sparse debate.

No abstract

Is visual perception “rich” or “sparse?” One finding supporting the “rich” hypothesis shows that a specific visual summary representation, color variability, is represented “cost-free” outside focally-attended regions in dual-task paradigms (Bronfman et al. 2014). Here, we investigated whether this “cost-free” phenomenon for color variability perception extends to peripheral vision. We performed three experiments: in our first experiment, we replicated previous findings and verified that color variability is represented “cost-free” in central vision. In our second experiment, we extended the paradigm to peripheral vision and found that in minimally-attended regions of space, color variability perception was impaired. In a third and final experiment, we added confidence judgments to our task, and found that participants maintained high levels of metacognitive awareness of impaired performance in minimally-attended regions of space. These findings provide evidence which challenges common conceptions on both sides of the rich vs. sparse debate.