When periphery rules: Enhanced sampling weights of the visual periphery in crowding across dimensions.

Area of Science:

• Visual perception
• Cognitive psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Visual crowding impairs object identification due to nearby flankers.
• Crowding exhibits an inner-outer asymmetry, with outer flankers causing greater interference.
• This asymmetry varies across feature dimensions like orientation and spatial frequency.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the manifestation of inner-outer asymmetry in visual crowding across diverse feature dimensions.
• To analyze how flanker position (inner vs. outer) influences crowding effects.
• To determine if weighting of peripheral items is a general characteristic of crowding.

Main Methods:

• Reanalysis of continuous estimation data from Yashar et al. (2019).
• Focus on the relative position of inner and outer flankers.
• Fitting probabilistic models to assign weights to target and flankers.

Main Results:

• Observers misreport outer flankers as targets for orientation and tilt stimuli, and to a lesser extent, color.
• For spatial frequency, observers average features but show a bias towards the outer flanker.
• A consistent pattern of increased weighting for more peripheral items was observed.

Conclusions:

• The inner-outer asymmetry in visual crowding is not uniform across all feature dimensions.
• Misreporting and feature averaging are distinct mechanisms underlying crowding.
• Increased weighting of peripheral items appears to be a general characteristic of crowding in peripheral vision.