TEXTURE SEGMENTATION ALONG THE HORIZONTAL MERIDIAN - NONMONOTONIC CHANGES IN PERFORMANCE WITH ECCENTRICITY

In 3 experiments, subjects were required to detect the presence of a s mall region of disparate texture embedded in a larger background at a range of eccentricities. Detection performance always peaked several d egrees from fixation. Experiment 1 showed that the location of the pea k was not retinally specific: scaling the display changed the location of the performance peak. Experiment 2 showed that poor foveal perform ance could not be explained by cross-frequency interference; filtering out high spatial frequencies did not lead to improved foveal performa nce. Experiment 3 showed that the effect is not unique to textures com prising left and right oblique line segments. A parsimonious account o f these data is that, at the fovea, there is a mismatch between the sc ale of the texture and the scale of mechanisms responsible for encodin g texture differences. This mismatch diminishes as the textures are mo ved further into the periphery.