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
- © 2019 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
- 2019. Seven myths on crowding. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27353v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27353v2
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 be sensibly stated as saying that ‘critical distance for crowding is about half the target’s eccentricity’. (2) Crowding is predominantly a peripheral phenomenon. (3) Crowding increases strongly and steadily with eccentricity (as does the minimal angle of resolution, MAR). (4) Crowding is asymmetric as Bouma (1970) has shown. (5) For the inward-outward asymmetry the more peripheral flanker is the more important one. (6) Critical crowding distance corresponds to a constant cortical distance in primary visual areas like V1. (7) Except for Bouma (1970), crowding research mostly started in the 2000s. I propose the answer is ‘no!’ or ‘not really’ 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
Changes in response to review comments from fellow scientists