Figure 2.

Schematic overview of temporal sequences of displays from Experiment 1. In all conditions, an observer's task was to fixate the spot and identify the orientation of the middle U. A, Standard crowding, in which the target and flankers' onsets and offsets were synchronous. A, B, In two other conditions, we varied the onset time of the flankers relative to the target (B), or the offset time of the flankers relative to the target (C). Note that, as designated by the thick black frames in each display sequence, the target and flankers appeared concurrently for 58 ms in all conditions. As shown by the dotted frames in B and C, we increased the duration of the flankers by a variable amount to introduce an onset asynchrony or offset asynchrony, respectively. Movie 1 shows a demonstration of the effects of onset and offset asynchrony on the discriminability of a crowded letter.