ArticleCurrent biology : CB2010
Crowding changes appearance.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 51 papers.
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Who cites it
51 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Thematic knowledge survives visual crowding and influences object identification.Psychological research · 2026Article
- The development of visual acuity and crowding reveals the slow fine-tuning of foveal vision.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Target-flanker similarity alters the spatial profile of visual crowding.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Measuring spatial and temporal properties of visual crowding using continuous psychophysics.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Foveal crowding modifies a target's properties under a brief presentation time.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Color crowding considered as adaptive spatial integration.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- Effects of involuntary and voluntary attention on critical spacing of visual crowding.Journal of vision · 2023Article
- How do (perceptual) distracters distract?PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Crowding results from optimal integration of visual targets with contextual information.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Multidimensional feature interactions in visual crowding: When configural cues eliminate the polarity advantage.Journal of vision · 2022Article
- Crowding changes appearance systematically in peripheral, amblyopic, and developing vision.Journal of vision · 2022Article
- Spatial structure, phase, and the contrast of natural images.Journal of vision · 2022Article
- Broad attention uncovers benefits of stimulus uniformity in visual crowding.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Geometrically restricted image descriptors: A method to capture the appearance of shape.Journal of vision · 2021Article
- Visual crowding effect in the parvocellular and magnocellular visual pathways.Journal of vision · 2020Article
- Excessive visual crowding effects in developmental dyscalculia.Journal of vision · 2020Article
- Learning to see the Ebbinghaus illusion in the periphery reveals a top-down stabilization of size perception across the visual field.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Redundancy masking: The loss of repeated items in crowded peripheral vision.Journal of vision · 2020Article
- Dissociable effects of visual crowding on the perception of color and motion.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Crowding is the breakdown in object recognition that occurs in cluttered visual environments and the fundamental limit on peripheral vision, affecting identification within many visual modalities and across large spatial regions. Though frequently characterized as a disruptive process through which object representations are suppressed or lost altogether, we demonstrate that crowding systematically changes the appearance of objects. In particular, target patches of visual noise that are surrounded ("crowded") by oriented Gabor flankers become perceptually oriented, matching the flankers. This was established with a change-detection paradigm: under crowded conditions, target changes from noise to Gabor went unnoticed when the Gabor orientation matched the flankers (and the illusory target percept), despite being easily detected when they differed. Rotation of the flankers (leaving target noise unaltered) also induced illusory target rotations. Blank targets led to similar results, demonstrating that crowding can induce apparent structure where none exists. Finally, adaptation to these stimuli induced a tilt aftereffect at the target location, consistent with signals from the flankers "spreading" across space. These results confirm predictions from change-based models of crowding, such as averaging, and establish crowding as a regularization process that simplifies the peripheral field by promoting consistent appearance among adjacent objects.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.