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:e27353v3 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27353v3
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 succinctly 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) Crowding increases strongly and linearly with eccentricity (as does the minimal angle of resolution, MAR). (5) Crowding is asymmetric as Bouma (1970) 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 (1970) paper, crowding research mostly started in the 2000s. I propose the answer is ‘not really’ to these assertions. So should we care? I think we should, before we write the textbooks for the next generation.
Author Comment
Revised and extended according reviewers' comments