Fig. 1.

Stimuli used in experiment 1. Stimuli consisted of five Gabor patches arranged on a cross. The central patch is the target, and the others are distractors. When viewed at high eccentricities, vertical distractors (B) induce a crowding effect on the target: The orientation of the target tends to assimilate with the similar orientation of the distractors, making small deviations from the vertical more difficult to discriminate. This effect does not occur with horizontal distractors (A), which are less similar in orientation. The crowding effect can be experienced by holding the figure at arms' length and fixating a few centimeters off the targets.