August 2012
Volume 12, Issue 9
Free
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   August 2012
Presenting a target and its surrounding flankers in different eyes reduces visual crowding, even though eye of origin difference is imperceptible
Author Affiliations
  • Xiaomeng Zhang
    School of Physics, Peking University, China
  • Gao Meng
    School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, China
  • Li Zhaoping
    School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, China\nDepartment of Computer Science, University College London, UK
Journal of Vision August 2012, Vol.12, 327. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/12.9.327
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      Xiaomeng Zhang, Gao Meng, Li Zhaoping; Presenting a target and its surrounding flankers in different eyes reduces visual crowding, even though eye of origin difference is imperceptible. Journal of Vision 2012;12(9):327. https://doi.org/10.1167/12.9.327.

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      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

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Abstract

Perceptual distinction between a peripheral target and its surrounding flankers is known to relieve the target from visual crowding. This distinction can be caused by color, depth, shape, luminance, size, contrast polarity, spatial frequencies, motion, and contrast. It has also been reported that crowding is not affected by whether the target and flankers are presented in the same or different eyes (Levi 2008). However, in a task to discriminate the orientation of a letter C, whether it is in its normal or 180 degree rotated version, we found that crowding was substantially reduced when the flanking Os were in a different eye from the target, for both 4 and 8 flankers, in all three observers tested. Observers reported that they could not tell whether all items were in the same eye. However, such a relieve from crowding by dichoptic presentation was not apparent when the task was to identify the orientation of a letter T flanked by four other Ts, each randomly oriented in one of four possible orientations (see also Kooi, Toet, Tripathy, and Levi 1994). We suggest that the relieve from crowding was achieved by a more salient target under dichoptic presentation, making the target more easily selected by exogenous attention and thereby decoded in subsequent visual processing. According to the V1 saliency hypothesis (Li 2002), the saliency of any location is determined by the highest V1 neural response to it. An eye of origin singleton target becomes salient when the flanking Os suppress each other more strongly than they do to the target, due to V1’s intra-cortical suppression that is eye of origin selective (DeAngelis, Freeman Ohzawa 1996, Zhaoping 2008). However, collinear facilitation between V1 neurons responding to various bars in the Ts may interfere with intra-cortical suppression to make the saliency mechanism effective.

Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2012

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