Seven myths on crowding
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Computational Biology, Neuroscience, Anatomy and Physiology, Ophthalmology, Psychiatry and Psychology
- Keywords
- Crowding, Psychophysics, Perception, Reading, Visual acuity, Peripheral vision, Fovea, Sensory systems, Vision science, Visual field
- Copyright
- © 2018 Strasburger
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Seven myths on crowding. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27353v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27353v1
Abstract
Crowding research has become a hotbed of vision research and some fundamentals are now widely agreed upon. It is highly likely that you would agree with the following statements. 1) Bouma’s Law can be sensibly stated as saying that ‘critical distance for crowding is about half the target’s eccentricity’. 2) Crowding is a peripheral phenomenon. 3) Crowding increases drastically and steadily with eccentricity (as does the minimal angle of resolution, MAR). 4) Crowding asymmetry: For the nasal-temporal asymmetry of crowding, Bouma’s (1970) paper is the one to cite. 5) The more peripheral flanker is the more important in crowding. 6) Critical crowding distance corresponds to a constant cortical distance in primary visual areas like V1. 7) Except for Bouma (1970), serious crowding research pretty much started in the 2000s. I propose the answer is ‘no!’ to most all of these questions. So should we care? I think we should, before we write the textbooks for the next generation.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints. The slides from a talk at the ECVP 2018 in Trieste with the same title are also on PeerJ Preprints at https://peerj.com/preprints/27250.