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Visual crowding is a combination of an increase of positional uncertainty, source confusion, and featural averaging539.11 kB
Published VersionCC BY V4.0, Open Access
Journal article
Visual crowding is a combination of an increase of positional uncertainty, source confusion, and featural averaging
Scientific Reports, Vol.7(1), pp.1-9
2017
PMCID: PMC5381224
PMID: 28378781
Abstract
Although we perceive a richly detailed visual world, our ability to identify individual objects is severely limited in clutter, particularly in peripheral vision. Models of such “crowding” have generally been driven by the phenomenological misidentifications of crowded targets: using stimuli that do not easily combine to form a unique symbol (e.g. letters or objects), observers typically confuse the source of objects and report either the target or a distractor, but when continuous features are used (e.g. orientated gratings or line positions) observers report a feature somewhere between the target and distractor. To reconcile these accounts, we develop a hybrid method of adjustment that allows detailed analysis of these multiple error categories. Observers reported the orientation of a target, under several distractor conditions, by adjusting an identical foveal target. We apply new modelling to quantify whether perceptual reports show evidence of positional uncertainty, source confusion, and featural averaging on a trial-by-trial basis. Our results show that observers make a large proportion of source-confusion errors. However, our study also reveals the distribution of perceptual reports that underlie performance in this crowding task more generally: aggregate errors cannot be neatly labelled because they are heterogeneous and their structure depends on target-distractor distance.
Details
- Title
- Visual crowding is a combination of an increase of positional uncertainty, source confusion, and featural averaging
- Authors
- William J. Harrison (Corresponding Author) - University of CambridgePeter J. Bex (Author) - Northeastern University
- Publication details
- Scientific Reports, Vol.7(1), pp.1-9
- Publisher
- Nature Publishing Group
- Date published
- 2017
- DOI
- 10.1038/srep45551
- ISSN
- 2045-2322
- PMID
- 28378781; PMC5381224
- Copyright note
- © The Author(s) 2017. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Organisation Unit
- School of Health - Psychology
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 99996797102621
- Output Type
- Journal article
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- International collaboration
- Web Of Science research areas
- Ophthalmology