In crowding, perception of a target is strongly deteriorated by nearby elements. Crowding is often explained by pooling models predicting that adding flankers increases crowding. In contrast, the centroid hypothesis proposes that adding flankers decreases crowding--"bigger is better." In foveal vision, we have recently shown that adding flankers can increase or decrease crowding depending on wh...

Crowding is the identification difficulty for a target in the presence of nearby flankers. Based on psychophysical findings, many theories have been proposed to explain crowding at multiple levels. However, little is known about its neural mechanism. In this study, we combined psychophysical and fMRI adaptation techniques to search for the cortical locus of crowding. In the psychophysical exper...

Crowding, generally defined as the deleterious influence of nearby contours on visual discrimination, is ubiquitous in spatial vision. Crowding impairs the ability to recognize objects in clutter. It has been extensively studied over the last 80 years or so, and much of the renewed interest is the hope that studying crowding may lead to a better understanding of the processes involved in object...

Spatial interactions are a critical and ubiquitous feature of spatial vision. These interactions may be inhibitory (reducing sensitivity as occurs in crowding) or facilitatory (enhancing sensitivity). In this work, we had four goals. 1. To test the hypothesis that foveal crowding depends on target size by measuring the extent of crowding for novel targets that were limited in their spatial freq...

This paper summarises the consequences of emergency department crowding. It provides a comparison of the scales used to measure emergency department crowding. We discuss the multiple causes of crowding and present an up-to-date literature review of the interventions that reduce the adverse consequences of crowding. We consider interventions at the level of an individual hospital and a policy le...

Matching donations without crowding out? Some theoretical considerations, a field, and a lab experiment* Is there a way of matching donations that avoids crowding out? We introduce a novel matching method where the matched amount is allocated to a different project, present some simple theoretical considerations that predict reduced crowding out or more crowding in (depending on the degree of s...

Crowding refers to the disrupted recognition of an object by nearby distractors. Prior work has shown that real-world music-reading experts experience reduced crowding specifically for musical stimuli. However, it is unclear whether music-reading training reduced the magnitude of crowding or whether individuals showing less crowding are more likely to learn and excel in music reading later. To ...

Protein dynamics in cells may be different from those in dilute solutions in vitro, because the environment in cells is highly concentrated with other macromolecules. This volume exclusion because of macromolecular crowding is predicted to affect both equilibrium and kinetic processes involving protein conformational changes. To quantify macromolecular crowding effects on protein folding mechan...