Beyond Bouma's window: How to explain global aspects of crowding?

Adrien Doerig; Alban Bornet; Ruth Rosenholtz; Gregory Francis; Aaron M Clarke; Michael H Herzog

doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006580

Beyond Bouma's window: How to explain global aspects of crowding?

PLoS Comput Biol. 2019 May 10;15(5):e1006580. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006580. eCollection 2019 May.

Authors

Adrien Doerig¹, Alban Bornet¹, Ruth Rosenholtz², Gregory Francis³, Aaron M Clarke⁴, Michael H Herzog¹

Affiliations

¹ Laboratory of Psychophysics, Brain Mind Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland.
² Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States of America.
³ Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States of America.
⁴ Laboratory of Computational Vision, Psychology Department, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey.

Abstract

In crowding, perception of an object deteriorates in the presence of nearby elements. Although crowding is a ubiquitous phenomenon, since elements are rarely seen in isolation, to date there exists no consensus on how to model it. Previous experiments showed that the global configuration of the entire stimulus must be taken into account. These findings rule out simple pooling or substitution models and favor models sensitive to global spatial aspects. In order to investigate how to incorporate global aspects into models, we tested a large number of models with a database of forty stimuli tailored for the global aspects of crowding. Our results show that incorporating grouping like components strongly improves model performance.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Computer Simulation
Crowding / psychology*
Discrimination, Psychological
Humans
Pattern Recognition, Visual / physiology*
Perceptual Masking
Space Perception
Visual Fields

Grants and funding

Adrien Doerig was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation grant n.176153 “Basics of visual processing: from elements to figures”. Alban Bornet was supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation under the Specific Grant Agreements No. 720270 (Human Brain Project SGA1) and No. 785907 (Human Brain Project SGA2). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.