Seven myths on crowding and peripheral vision
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Author and article information
Abstract
Crowding has become a hot topic in vision research and some fundamentals are now widely agreed upon. For the classical crowding task, one would likely agree with the following statements. (1) Bouma’s law can, succinctly and unequivocally, be stated as saying that critical distance for crowding is about half the target’s eccentricity. (2) Crowding is predominantly a peripheral phenomenon. (3) Peripheral vision extends to at most 90° eccentricity. (4) Resolution threshold (the minimal angle of resolution, MAR) increases strongly and linearly with eccentricity. Crowding increases at an even steeper rate. (5) Crowding is asymmetric as Bouma has shown. For that inner-outer asymmetry, the peripheral flanker has more effect. (6) Critical crowding distance corresponds to a constant cortical distance in primary visual areas like V1. (7) Except for Bouma’s seminal paper in 1970, crowding research mostly became prominent starting in the 2000s. I propose the answer is ‘not really’ or ‘not quite’ to these assertions. So should we care? I think we should, before we write the textbook chapters for the next generation.
Cite this as
2019. Seven myths on crowding and peripheral vision. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27353v4 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27353v4note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
Author comment
Added content, corrections and clarifications
Sections
Additional Information
Competing Interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Hans Strasburger conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, prepared figures and/or tables, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.
Funding
The authors received no funding for this work.
