Atypical visual field asymmetries in redundancy masking

Abstract

Redundancy masking is the reduction of the perceived number of items in repeating patterns. It shares a number of characteristics with crowding, the impairment of target identification in visual clutter. Crowding strongly depends on the location of the target in the visual field. For example, it is stronger in the upper compared to the lower visual field and is usually weakest on the horizontal meridian. This pattern of visual field asymmetries is common in spatial vision, as revealed by tasks measuring, for example, spatial resolution and contrast sensitivity. Here, to characterize redundancy masking and reveal its similarities to and differences from other spatial tasks, we investigated whether redundancy masking shows the same typical visual field asymmetries. Observers were presented with three to six radially arranged lines at 10° eccentricity at one of eight locations around fixation and were asked to report the number of lines. We found asymmetries that differed pronouncedly from those found in crowding. Redundancy masking did not differ between upper and lower visual fields. Importantly, redundancy masking was stronger on the horizontal meridian than on the vertical meridian, the opposite of what is usually found in crowding. These results show that redundancy masking diverges from crowding in regard to visual field asymmetries, suggesting different underlying mechanisms of redundancy masking and crowding. We suggest that the observed atypical visual field asymmetries in redundancy masking are due to the superior extraction of regularity and a more pronounced compression of visual space on the horizontal compared to the vertical meridian.

Crowding: Recent advances and perspectives

“…Another characteristic of crowding is its visual field dependence. Yildirim et al. (2022) show how redundancy masking, the decrease in the number of perceived items in repeating patterns, has different visual field asymmetries than crowding, adding to the increasing evidence that—although related to crowding—redundancy masking is a unique phenomenon.…”

“…By contrast, Rummens and Sayim (2022) demonstrate how strong target-flanker grouping (and high target-flanker similarity) decreased crowding: When target-flanker configurations were informative about target identity, performance was better than in uninformative configurations. They further show how emergent features and redundancy masking, the reduction of the number of perceived items in repeating patterns ( Sayim & Taylor, 2019 ; Yildirim, Coates, & Sayim, 2022 ), could have driven this inversion of the usual effect of target-flanker similarity.…”

The radial–tangential anisotropy of numerosity perception

“…However, crowding could still underlie underestimation if crowded items were perceptually merged with (i.e., not segmented from) neighboring items. An alternative explanation for underestimation in peripheral vision is redundancy masking (RM), a recently discovered phenomenon in which the number of perceived items in repeating patterns is lower than the number of presented items ( Sayim & Taylor, 2019 ; Sayim et al, 2022 ; Yildirim, Coates, & Sayim, 2020 ; Yildirim, Coates, & Sayim, 2021 ; Yildirim, Coates, & Sayim, 2022 ; Yildirim-Keles, Coates, & Sayim, 2024 ). For example, when presenting an array of identical, radially arranged lines in the visual periphery, observers often report fewer lines than were presented, even with as few as three lines ( Yildirim et al, 2020 ; Yildirim et al, 2021 ).…”

“…Both crowding and RM are subject to a strong radial–tangential anisotropy ( Feng, Jiang, & He, 2007 ; Greenwood, Szinte, Sayim, & Cavanagh, 2017 ; Kwon, Bao, Millin, & Tjan, 2014 ; Pelli & Tillman, 2008 ; Petrov & Meleshkevich, 2011 ; Toet & Levi, 1992 ; Yildirim et al, 2020 ; Yildirim et al, 2022 ). In crowding, radially placed flankers interfere more strongly with target perception than tangentially placed flankers ( Figure 1 A).…”

Multidimensional feature interactions in visual crowding: When configural cues eliminate the polarity advantage

“…Crowding mainly manifests itself in peripheral vision (for foveal crowding, see Coates, Levi, Touch, & Sabesan, 2018 ; Malania, Herzog, & Westheimer, 2007 ; Sayim, Westheimer, & Herzog, 2008a ; Sayim et al, 2010 ; Sayim et al, 2011 ), limiting various capacities, ranging from reading ( Pelli, Tillman, Freeman, Su, Berger, & Majaj, 2007 ; Pelli & Tillman, 2008 ), to visual search ( Carrasco, Evert, Chang, & Katz, 1995 ; Reddy & VanRullen, 2007 ; Rosenholtz, Huang, Raj, Balas, & Ilie, 2012 ; Sayim, Westheimer & Herzog, 2011 ; Vlaskamp & Hooge, 2006 ), and object recognition ( Levi, 2008 ; Pelli & Tillman, 2008 ; Wallace & Tjan, 2011 ; Whitney & Levi, 2011 ). Although crowding is usually assumed not to affect target detection ( Chung, 2010 ; Levi, Hariharan, & Klein, 2002 ; Pelli, Palomares, & Majaj, 2004 ), parts of targets or even entire targets are often lost in crowded displays ( Coates, Bernard, & Chung, 2019 ; Sayim & Taylor, 2019 ; Sayim & Wagemans, 2017 ; Taylor & Sayim, 2020 ; Yildirim, Coates, & Sayim, 2019 ; Yildirim, Coates, & Sayim, 2020 ; Yildirim, Coates, & Sayim, 2021 ; Yildirim, Coates, & Sayim, 2022 ). A particularly strong loss was found in repeating patterns, for example, when observers report only two of three presented lines ( Yildirim, Coates, & Sayim, 2020 ; Yildirim, Coates, & Sayim, 2021 ).…”