Seven myths on crowding

Crowding research has become a hotbed of vision research and some fundamentals are now widely agreed upon. It is highly likely that you would 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 a peripheral phenomenon. 3) Crowding increases drastically and steadily with eccentricity (as does the minimal angle of resolution, MAR). 4) Crowding asymmetry: For the nasal-temporal asymmetry of crowding, Bouma’s (1970) paper is the one to cite. 5) The more peripheral flanker is the more important in crowding. 6) Critical crowding distance corresponds to a constant cortical distance in primary visual areas like V1. 7) Except for Bouma (1970), serious crowding research pretty much started in the 2000s. I propose the answer is ‘no!’ to most all of these questions. So should we care? I think we should, before we write the textbooks for the next generation.