Response selection modulates crowding: a cautionary tale for invoking top-down explanations.

ABSTRACT: Object recognition in the periphery is limited by clutter. This phenomenon of visual crowding is ameliorated when the objects are dissimilar. This effect of inter-object similarity has been extensively studied for low-level features and is thought to reflect bottom-up processes. Recently, crowding was also found to be reduced when objects belonged to explicitly distinct groups; that is, crowding was weak when they had low group membership similarity. It has been claimed that top-down knowledge is necessary to explain this effect of group membership, implying that the effect of similarity on crowding cannot be a purely bottom-up process. We tested the claim that the effect of group membership relies on knowledge in two experiments and found that neither explicit knowledge about differences

SUBMITTER: Reuther J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7297837 | biostudies-literature | 2020 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature