The effect of spacing regularity on visual crowding

Saarela, Toni; Westheimer, Gerald; Herzog, Michael H.

doi:10.1167/10.10.17

Cited by 47 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Our findings with peripheral vernier stimuli are very similar to previous findings with foveally presented verniers (Malania et al, 2007;Sayim et al, 2008Sayim et al, , 2010. Very similar effects of grouping were also found with Gabor stimuli (Saarela et al, 2009;Saarela et al, 2010) and letters (Saarela et al, 2010) presented in the periphery.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…So, when is bigger better in crowding? We proposed that crowding diminishes when the target ungroups and stands out from the flankers (Malania et al, 2007;Saarela et al, 2009;Saarela, Westheimer, & Herzog, 2010;Sayim, Westheimer, & Herzog, 2008;Sayim et al, 2010. Bigger is better in the short and long flanker conditions because adding flankers enhances flanker-flanker grouping and, thus, target ungrouping from the flankers.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We propose that bigger is better when increases in the number or size of the flankers lead to ungrouping of the target from the flankers. Bigger is worse when it enhances grouping of the target with the flankers (Malania et al, 2007;Saarela et al, 2009;Saarela et al, 2010;Sayim et al, 2008Sayim et al, , 2010.…”

Section: Centroidsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Grouping, pooling, and when bigger is better in visual crowding

2012

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In crowding, perception of a target is strongly deteriorated by nearby elements. Crowding is often explained by pooling models predicting that adding flankers increases crowding. In contrast, the centroid hypothesis proposes that adding flankers decreases crowding--"bigger is better." In foveal vision, we have recently shown that adding flankers can increase or decrease crowding depending on whether the target groups or ungroups from the flankers. We have further shown how configural effects, such as good and global Gestalt, determine crowding. Foveal and peripheral crowding do not always reveal the same characteristics. Here, we show that the very same grouping and Gestalt results of foveal vision are also found in the periphery. These results can neither be explained by simple pooling nor by centroid models. We discuss when bigger is better and how grouping might shape crowding.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Grouping, pooling, and when bigger is better in visual crowding

2012

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“…This difference most likely reflects differences in the number and arrangement of flankers in the three tasks. Indeed, many recent studies have found varied results when configurations or grouping of flankers and targets are manipulated within and across tasks (Danilova & Bondarko, 2007;Levi & Carney, 2009;Livne & Sagi, 2010;Saarela, Westheimer, & Herzog, 2010). Crowding zones are generally elongated, with the principal axis aligned with the center of the fovea.…”

Section: Is Crowding Task Independent?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Crowding is size and eccentricity dependent

Gurnsey¹,

Roddy²,

Chanab³

2011

Journal of Vision

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Crowding is a form of lateral interaction in which flanking items interfere with the detection or discrimination of a target stimulus. It is believed that crowding is a property of peripheral vision only and that no crowding occurs at fixation. If these two claims are true, then there must be a change in the nature of crowding interactions across the visual field. In three different tasks, we determined target size and flanker separation at threshold for eccentricities of 0 to 16° in the lower visual field for 7 relative separations (1.25 to 8 times target size). In all three tasks, the magnitude of crowding increases with eccentricity; there was no crowding at fixation and extreme crowding at 16°. Using a novel double-scaling procedure, we show that the non-foveal data in all three tasks can be characterized as shifted versions of the same psychometric function such that different sections of the function characterize data at each eccentricity. This pattern of results can be understood in terms of size-dependent responses to the target and distance-dependent interference from the flankers. The data suggest that the distance-dependent interference increases with eccentricity.

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“…These interpretations, however, have been challenged by recent flndings (Malania, Herzog, & Westheimer, 2007;Sareela, Westheimer, & Herzog, 2010;Sayim et al, 2008) suggesting the involvement of midlevel grouping processes. For example, Malania et al (2007) found that adding multiple flankers on either side of the target led to a reduction of the masking effect, contrary to predictions from lateral inhibition and pooling accounts.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Time course of spatial contextual interference: Event history analyses of simultaneous masking by nonoverlapping patterns.

Panis¹,

Hermens²

2014

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Simultaneous masking refers to the impairment of performance on a visual target by simultaneously presented flankers. Whereas the spatial aspects of simultaneous masking have been studied extensively, the time course of these spatial influences is much less well understood. We here measure response latency and accuracy in a simultaneous masking paradigm and apply event history analysis to study the time course of target-flanker interactions. In our experiments, we presented a central target vernier flanked on both sides by 12 aligned distractor verniers that were either shorter, longer, or equal in length (Experiment 1), and that also were congruent or incongruent in their spatial offset with the target (Experiment 2). Response time distributions showed that there were more fast responses when the target was flanked by short flankers. Conditional accuracy functions showed that accuracy of responses dropped when the flankers had the same length as the target, but only for slow responses. These results are at odds with accounts based solely on lateral neural interactions or response competition, and instead suggest that top-down visual object-to-feature interference occurs when the target is not selected fast enough, congruent with object substitution theory.

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The effect of spacing regularity on visual crowding

Cited by 47 publications

References 32 publications

Grouping, pooling, and when bigger is better in visual crowding

Grouping, pooling, and when bigger is better in visual crowding

Crowding is size and eccentricity dependent

Time course of spatial contextual interference: Event history analyses of simultaneous masking by nonoverlapping patterns.

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