Figure 1.

Illustration of Crowding

An illustration of visual crowding based on Blessing of the Tuna Fleet at Groix by Paul Signac. In the right half of the image, 41% of the pixels have been “phase scrambled” within localized circular patches, preserving only the local contrast or luminance structure at these locations (as indicated in the lower left inset). However, when fixating the central red cross, the scrambled regions become indistinguishable from their surrounding context. For instance, the vertically oriented structure among the boat masts is remarkably similar in the left and right visual fields, despite the right-hand side being considerably disrupted. These changes in the appearance of cluttered visual scenes result from crowding [1, 2], which simplifies the peripheral visual field into texture [3, 14].