Crowding, Patterns and the Fundamentals of Vision

Abstract:

In most models of vision, low level visual tasks are explained by low 
level neural mechanisms. For example, in crowding, perception of a 
target is impeded by nearby elements because, as proposed, responses of 
neurons coding for nearby elements are pooled. Indeed, performance 
deteriorated when a vernier stimulus was flanked by two lines, one on 
each side. However, performance improved strongly when the lines were 
extended to squares. Classic models cannot explain this uncrowding
effect because the neighboring lines are part of the squares. I will 
show how these and other simple behavioral results challenge many common 
sense ideas about vision and propose a new framework based on 
Gestalt-like processing.