Color diversity judgments in peripheral vision: Evidence against "cost-free" representations.

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.