Crowding--an essential bottleneck for object recognition: a mini-review

Crowding, generally defined as the deleterious influence of nearby contours on visual discrimination, is ubiquitous in spatial vision. Crowding impairs the ability to recognize objects in clutter. It has been extensively studied over the last 80 years or so, and much of the renewed interest is the hope that studying crowding may lead to a better understanding of the processes involved in object recognition. Crowding also has important clinical implications for patients with macular degeneration, amblyopia and dyslexia. There is no shortage of theories for crowding-from low-level receptive field models to high-level attention. The current picture is that crowding represents an essential bottleneck for object perception, impairing object perception in peripheral, amblyopic and possibly developing vision. Crowding is neither masking nor surround suppression. We can localize crowding to the cortex, perhaps as early as V1; however, there is a growing consensus for a two-stage model of crowding in which the first stage involves the detection of simple features (perhaps in V1), and a second stage is required for the integration or interpretation of the features as an object beyond V1. There is evidence for top-down effects in crowding, but the role of attention in this process remains unclear. The strong effect of learning in shrinking the spatial extent of crowding places strong constraints on possible models for crowding and for object recognition. The goal of this review is to try to provide a broad, balanced and succinct review that organizes and summarizes the diverse and scattered studies of crowding, and also helps to explain it to the non-specialist. A full understanding of crowding may allow us to understand this bottleneck to object recognition and the rules that govern the integration of features into objects.