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Visual crowding is a combination of an increase of positional uncertainty, source confusion, and featural averaging

View ORCID ProfileWilliam J Harrison, Peter J Bex
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/088898
William J Harrison
1Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland
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Peter J Bex
2Department of Psychology, Northeastern University
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Abstract

Although we perceive a richly detailed visual world, our ability to identify 1 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.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted November 21, 2016.
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Visual crowding is a combination of an increase of positional uncertainty, source confusion, and featural averaging
William J Harrison, Peter J Bex
bioRxiv 088898; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/088898
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Visual crowding is a combination of an increase of positional uncertainty, source confusion, and featural averaging
William J Harrison, Peter J Bex
bioRxiv 088898; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/088898

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