Foveal representation for briefly presented peripheral visual stimuli

Vision shapes our everyday experience, yet many mechanisms remain poorly understood. For example, when an object suddenly appears in the periphery – such as a car while crossing the road – it is still unclear how the brain represents it in order to make fast, accurate decisions. Prior work has suggested that peripheral objects can be remapped onto foveal primary visual cortex (V1), perhaps leveraging its high resolution to aid discrimination (Williams et al., 2008; Fan et al., 2016; Hou et al., 2024; Constantino et al., 2025). However, to date this phenomenon has only been observed using one particular task, which requires comparing two peripheral stimuli and determining whether they are exactly the same or not. This task may particularly encourage the use of explicit visual imagery and remapping to fovea as an effective strategy. Here we investigate whether this phenomenon of foveal remapping generalizes to cases when only one stimulus is presented, which would demonstrate the general principles of remapping, which apply to situations more broadly. We use novel stimuli in a categorization task, while participants undergo functional magnetic resonance imaging. Specifically, participants view briefly presented objects (for 100 ms) in the periphery while fixating centrally and making object categorization judgments. Stimuli are continuous morphs between object pairs (e.g., dog–bear, tractor–truck), while the categorization task always required binary (dog vs. bear) decisions. We investigate whether foveal parts of early visual cortex contain information about peripherally presented stimuli. Specifically, we will examine whether remapped content reflects pictorially-copied information from peripheral presentation or a task-reformatted, category-focused representation. Additionally, we will test whether foveal engagement is varied with difficulty of the categorization. The results will clarify the role of V1’s foveal circuitry for peripheral vision, and more broadly expand our understanding of the visual system.