Positional averaging explains crowding with letter-like stimuli
Greenwood JA, Bex PJ, Dakin SC. Positional averaging explains
crowding with letter-like stimuli. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences {USA} [Internet]. 2009;106:13130–5.   Visual
crowding is a breakdown in object identification that occurs in
cluttered scenes, a process that represents the principle
restriction on visual performance in the periphery. When crowded
objects are presented experimentally, a key finding is that
observers frequently report nearby flanking items instead of the
target. This observation has led to the proposal that crowding
reflects increased noise in the positional code for objects;
although how the presence of nearby objects might disrupt
positional encoding remains unclear. We quantified this
disruption using cross-like stimuli, where observers judged
whether the horizontal target line was positioned above or below
the stimulus midpoint. Overall, observers were poorer at judging
position in the presence of