Attentional priming releases crowding A Kristjansson1, P Heimisson1, G F Robertsson1, D Whitney2 |
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1Department of Psychology, University of Iceland, Iceland |
| Views of natural scenes unfold over time, and objects of interest that were present a moment ago tend to remain present. Visual crowding places a fundamental limit on object recognition in cluttered scenes. Most studies of crowding suffer from the limitation that they typically involve static scenes. The role of object continuity in crowding is therefore unaddressed. We investigated intertrial effects upon crowding in visual scenes showing that crowding is considerably diminished when objects remain constant on consecutive visual search trials. Both constant target and distractor identity decrease the critical distance for crowding from flankers. More generally, our results show how object continuity through between-trial priming releases objects otherwise unidentifiable from crowding. Crowding, although a significant bottleneck on object recognition, can be strongly mitigated by statistically likely temporal continuity of objects. Crowding therefore depends not only on what is momentarily present, but also on what was previously attended. |
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