PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Min Zhang
AU  - Rachel N Denison
AU  - Denis G Pelli
AU  - Thuy Tien C Le
AU  - Antje Ihlefeld
TI  - Informational masking vs. crowding — A mid-level trade-off between auditory and visual processing
AID  - 10.1101/2021.04.21.440826
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.04.21.440826
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/04/22/2021.04.21.440826.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/04/22/2021.04.21.440826.full
AB  - In noisy or cluttered environments, sensory cortical mechanisms help combine auditory or visual features into perceived objects. Knowing that individuals vary greatly in their ability to suppress unwanted sensory information, and knowing that the sizes of auditory and visual cortical regions are correlated, we wondered whether there might be a corresponding relation between an individual’s ability to suppress auditory vs. visual interference. In auditory masking, background sound makes spoken words unrecognizable. When masking arises due to interference at central auditory processing stages, beyond the cochlea, it is called informational masking (IM). A strikingly similar phenomenon in vision, called visual crowding, occurs when nearby clutter makes a target object unrecognizable, despite being resolved at the retina. We here compare susceptibilities to auditory IM and visual crowding in the same participants. Surprisingly, across participants, we find a negative correlation (R = −0.7) between IM susceptibility and crowding susceptibility: Participants who have low susceptibility to IM tend to have high susceptibility to crowding, and vice versa. This reveals a mid-level trade-off between auditory and visual processing.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.