The uncrowded window of object recognition

By Denis G. Pelli, Katharine A. Tillman. Nature Neuroscience, 2008

670 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is now emerging that vision is usually limited by object spacing rather than size. The visual system recognizes an object by detecting and then combining its features. 'Crowding' occurs when objects are too close together and features from several objects are combined into a jumbled percept. Here, we review the explosion of studies on crowding—in grating discrimination, letter and face recognition, visual search, selective attention, and reading—and find a universal principle, the Bouma law. The critical spacing required to prevent crowding is equal for all objects, although the effect is weaker between dissimilar objects. Furthermore, critical spacing at the cortex is independent of object position, and critical spacing at the visual field is proportional to object distance from fixation. The region where object spacing exceeds critical spacing is the 'uncrowded window'. Observers cannot recognize objects outside of this window and its size limits the speed of reading and search.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/06adae42f8c6bf2cd733db8515b1711cfed67ad1

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Citations in the corpus

Metamers of the ventral stream (2011, background): “Our model also provides an explanation for the phenomenon of visual crowdin”
Transforming Auto-Encoders (2011, background): “The phenomenon known as “crowding” [9] suggests that this type of confusion may occur in human vision.”
Visual Crowding: a fundamental limit on conscious perception and object recognition (2011, background): “Although there is great diversity in the stimuli employed (ranging from oriented bars, Gabor patches and shapes to letters, words, and faces among others—for reviews, see [1,2]), most studies of crowding implicitly (if not explicitly) argue that crowding is a unitary phenomenon, occurring at a singl”
Measuring contrast sensitivity (2013, neutral): “However, if many letters or symbols are present, small children have trouble knowing which symbol is being tested, and some clinical groups, including central ﬁeld loss, strabismic amblyopes, and apperceptive agnosics, may be affected by crowding (Levi, 2008; Pelli & Tillman, 2008).”