It is rare to find a crowding manuscript that fails to mention “Bouma's law,” the rule of thumb stating that flankers within a distance of about one half of the target eccentricity will induce crowding. Here we investigate the generality of this rule (even for just optotypes), the factors that modulate the critical spacing, and the evidence for the rule in Bouma's own data. We explore these questions by reanalyzing a variety of studies from the literature, running several new control experiments, and by utilizing a model that unifies flanked identification measurements between psychophysical paradigms. Specifically, with minimal assumptions (equivalent psychometric slopes across conditions, for example), crowded acuity can be predicted for arbitrary target sizes and flanker spacings, revealing a performance “landscape” that delineates the critical spacing. Last, we present a compact quantitative summary of the effects of different types of stimulus manipulations on optotype crowding.

As children develop, what changes in how they understand the behaviours of other people? Research into the development of children's 'Theory of Mind' (ToM i.e. their naïve beliefs about how other minds work and govern behaviour) has primarily focused on whether children predict others' actions considering their beliefs and goals or whether they 'egocentrically' base their predictions on their own mental states (e.g. Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). In both cases, whether the goals are those of the child or of the other person, the assumption is that children predict actions will be in the service of goals-that they are part of rational plans (e.g. Baker, Saxe, & Tanenbaum, 2009; Gergely & Csibra, 2003). However, many behaviours are in fact not based on plans; human actions are routinely rooted in reflexive habits, not reflective plans (e.g.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract