Visual crowding: Double dissociation between orientation and brightness judgments

Peripherally presented objects are often more difficult to identify when located in cluttered visual environments than when presented in isolation, a phenomenon known as visual crowding. Crowding tends to be stronger when target and nearby flanking elements are composed of similar sets of features. This study investigates the extent to which...

Dynamic distractor environments reveal classic visual field anisotropies for judgments of temporal order

Numerous studies have shown that visual performance critically depends on the stimulus’ projected retinal location. For example, performance tends to be better along the horizontal relative to the vertical meridian (lateral anisotropy). Another case is the so-called upper-lower anisotropy, whereby performance is better in the upper relative to...

Changes (but not differences) in motion direction fail to capture attention

In this study we investigated under what conditions motion direction changes pop out in continuously moving target/distractor environments. Participants were presented with vertically oriented Gabor patches whose carrier components drifted at a constant speed from left to right and then reversed direction. On any given trial, one of these...

Rapid recalibration to audiovisual asynchrony follows the physical—not the perceived—temporal order

In natural scenes, audiovisual events deriving from the same source are synchronized at their origin. However, from the perspective of the observer, there are likely to be significant multisensory delays due to physical and neural latencies. Fortunately, our brain appears to compensate for the resulting latency differences by rapidly adapting to...

Evolving the Keys to Visual Crowding

Peripheral vision can be severely impaired by nearby clutter. Decades of research using sparse displays have established that this phenomenon, known as visual crowding, follows Bouma's rule: Interference occurs for target-distractor separations up to half the target's eccentricity. Although considered a fundamental constraint on human vision, it...

Stereoscopic Segmentation Cues Improve Visual Timing Performance in Spatiotemporally Cluttered Environments

Recently, Cass and Van der Burg demonstrated that temporal order judgment (TOJ) precision could be profoundly impaired by the mere presence of dynamic visual clutter elsewhere in the visual field. This study examines whether presenting target and distractor objects in different depth planes might ameliorate this remote temporal camouflage (RTC)...