The genetic algorithm technique known as crowding preserves population diversity by pairing each offspring with a similar individual in the current population (pairing phase) and deciding which of the two will survive (replacement phase). The replacement phase of crowding is usually carried out through deterministic or probabilistic crowding, which have the limitations that they apply the same ...

Crowding between adjacent letters has been investigated primarily as a spatial effect. The purpose of this study was to investigate the spatio-temporal properties of letter crowding. Specifically, we examined the systematic changes in the degradation effects in letter identification performance when adjacent letters were presented with a temporal asynchrony, as a function of letter separation a...

A visual target is more difficult to recognize when it is surrounded by other, similar objects. This breakdown in object recognition is known as crowding. Despite a long history of experimental work, computational models of crowding are still sparse. Specifically, few studies have examined crowding using an ideal-observer approach. Here, we compare crowding in ideal observers with crowding in h...

In this study, we evaluated national differences in emergency department (ED) crowding to identify factors significantly associated with crowding in institutes and communities across Korea. This was a cross-sectional nationwide observational study using data abstracted from the National Emergency Department Information System (NEDIS). We calculated mean occupancy rates to quantify ED crowding s...

Amblyopia is a developmental visual disorder of cortical origin, characterized by crowding and poor acuity in central vision of the affected eye. Crowding refers to the adverse effects of surrounding items on object identification, common only in normal peripheral but not central vision. We trained a group of adult human amblyopes on a crowded letter identification task to assess whether the cr...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Emergency department (ED) crowding occurs when demands for ED care exceed the supply of available resources. Prior studies have shown that ED crowding is associated with a delay in provision of critical ED services, but the impact of ED crowding on acute stroke care has not been extensively studied. METHODS We conducted a retrospective study of patients who presented to...

Crowding occurs when the perception of a suprathreshold target is impaired by nearby distractors, reflecting a fundamental limitation on visual spatial resolution. It is likely that crowding limits music reading, as each musical note is crowded by adjacent notes and by the five-line staff, similar to word reading, in which letter recognition is reduced by crowding from adjacent letters. Here, w...

Investigations of visual crowding, where a target is difficult to identify because of flanking elements, has largely used a theoretical perspective based on local interactions where flanking elements pool with or substitute for properties of the target. This successful theoretical approach has motivated a wide variety of empirical investigations to identify mechanisms that cause crowding, and i...

Tolerance to crowding stress has played a crucial role in improving agronomic productivity in field corn; however, commercial sweet corn hybrids vary greatly in crowding stress tolerance. The objectives were to 1) explore transcriptional changes among sweet corn hybrids with differential yield under crowding stress, 2) identify relationships between phenotypic responses and gene expression patt...

Many protein functions can be directly linked to conformational changes. Inside cells, the equilibria and transition rates between different conformations may be affected by macromolecular crowding. We have recently developed a new approach for modeling crowding effects, which enables an atomistic representation of "test" proteins. Here this approach is applied to study how crowding affects the...