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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 8, 2026

Measuring the Behavioral Effects of Intraocular Scatter

Measuring the Behavioral Effects of Intraocular Scatter

Published on: February 18, 2021

The effect of spacing regularity on visual crowding.

T P Saarela¹, G Westheimer, M H Herzog

¹Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA. saarela@cns.nyu.edu

Journal of Vision

|October 2, 2010

Summary

Crowding, which hinders vision, is not always reduced by increasing the space between visual elements. Regular spacing can surprisingly worsen crowding by creating a unified texture that obscures individual details.

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Area of Science:

Visual perception
Cognitive psychology
Neuroscience

Background:

Crowding is a phenomenon in visual perception where the presence of surrounding stimuli (flankers) impairs the identification of a target.
Traditional models suggest that increasing the distance between targets and flankers reduces crowding.
Recent research highlights the role of perceptual organization and stimulus coherence in crowding.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the impact of target-flanker spacing on crowding in multi-element visual arrays.
To examine whether increasing inter-element distance consistently mitigates crowding effects.
To explore the influence of spacing regularity on the strength of crowding.

Main Methods:

Experimentation with multi-element stimulus arrays.
Systematic variation of target-flanker spacing and regularity.
Measurement of visual discrimination and recognition performance under different spacing conditions.

Main Results:

Increasing the average distance between target and flankers did not always decrease crowding.
In some conditions, increased spacing led to enhanced crowding.
Regular inter-element spacing was found to increase crowding effects.

Conclusions:

The regularity of spacing, not just the distance, is a critical factor in crowding.
Regular spacing can promote the perception of a coherent, texture-like stimulus, thereby increasing crowding.
This challenges the simple distance-based account of crowding and emphasizes perceptual organization.