Object identification in the visual periphery

What is it about?

People can easily identify a peripheral target when it is presented alone, but not when it is presented among nearby flankers, i.e. ‘crowding’. Crowding affects various perceptual tasks such as reading, and has implications for people with amblyopia, macular degeneration and dyslexia. We characterize crowding errors in different feature dimensions (color, spatial frequency and orientation) using estimation tasks and found that crowding does not behave uniformly across dimensions. Results revealed a tight link between crowding and ‘illusory conjunctions’ (mis-binding of feature-dimensions). Based on computational modeling we propose a parsimonious explanation, according to which spatial integration over neural populations that encode both orientation and SF together but color separately underlies both crowding and illusory conjunction in the periphery.

Featured Image

Photo by Duangphorn Wiriya on Unsplash

Photo by Duangphorn Wiriya on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Investigation of visual crowding can help us understand how the visual system integrates information in the periphery, and develop rehabilitation tools for various disorders associated with this phenomenon such as amblyopia, macular degeneration and dyslexia.