Seven myths on crowding

Crowding research has become a hotbed of vision research and some fundamentals are now widely agreed upon. You would agree with the following statements – wouldn’t you? 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 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 one in crowding. 6) Critical crowding distance corresponds to a constant cortical distance in V1. 7) Except for Bouma (1970), serious crowding research pretty much started in the noughties. I propose the answer is ‘no!’ to all these questions. So should we care? I think we should, before we write the textbooks for the next generation.