While foveated vision, a trait shared by many animals including humans, is a major contributor to biological visual performance, it has been underutilized in machine learning applications. This study investigates whether retinotopic mapping, a critical component of foveated vision, can enhance image categorization and localization performance when integrated into deep convolutional neural networks (CNN’s). Retinotopic mapping was used to transform the inputs of standard off-the-shelf CNN’s which were then retrained on the Imagenet task. Surprisingly, the networks with retinotopically-mapped inputs achieved a comparable performance in classification. Furthermore, the networks demonstrated improved classification localization when the foveated center of the transform was moved on the whole image. This replicates a crucial ability of the human visual system that is absent in typical CNN’s. These findings suggest that retinotopic mapping may be fundamental to significant preattentive visual processes, in particular the retinotopic version seems to be the best option when applying one of these networks to a visual search task.