Seven myths on crowding

Crowding has become a hot topic in vision research and some fundamentals are now widely agreed upon. For the classical crowding task one would likely agree with the following statements. (1) Bouma’s law can be sensibly stated as saying that ‘critical distance for crowding is about half the target’s eccentricity’. (2) Crowding is predominantly a peripheral phenomenon. (3) Crowding increases strongly and steadily with eccentricity (as does the minimal angle of resolution, MAR). (4) Crowding is asymmetric as Bouma (1970) has shown. (5) For the inward-outward asymmetry the more peripheral flanker is the more important one. (6) Critical crowding distance corresponds to a constant cortical distance in primary visual areas like V1. (7) Except for Bouma (1970), crowding research mostly started in the 2000s. I propose the answer is ‘no!’ or ‘not really’ to most all of these questions. So should we care? I think we should, before we write the textbooks for the next generation.