Crowding expands and is less sensitive to target-flanker differences during a shift of visual attention

Vision Res. 2023 Jul 27;212:108305. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2023.108305. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTTarget-flanker similarity and critical spacing control visual crowding when attention is pre-allocated, but these have not been studied when attention shifts. Flanked target Gabors appeared 8° left and right of central fixation throughout each 1.5 s trial. Subjects reported target Gabor tilt. In Expt. 1, target blinks increased accuracy, and flanker blinks decreased it, but only when attention shifted left or right from a central RSVP cue, hardly before it, indicating an exogenous/endogenous synergy. Whether parallel or orthogonal, flankers of the same wavelength as the target crowded substantially. Parallel half-wavelength flankers also crowded, but orthogonal half-wavelength ones did not. In Expt. 2, crowding when attention shifts was the same for targets and flankers within Bouma's bound (2.5° apart) as outside it (5.0° apart.) In Expt. 3, Bouma's bound was restored when attention was focused continuously on the target. We conclude that crowding temporarily expands and becomes less discriminative when attention shifts.PMID:37515890 | DOI:10.1016/j.visres.2023.108305

Source: Vision Research - July 29, 2023 Category: Opthalmology Authors: Jeff Nador Adam Reeves Source Type: research