This Week in The Journal

When there are many objects in our surrounding environment, the crowding of visual stimuli can hinder our ability to recognize and discriminate between objects.Researchers have long investigated the neural underpinnings of this.However, most previous work has focused on how visual crowding affects peripheral vision, not foveal vision, and the influence of fixational eye movements on foveal crowding has never been examined.Clark and colleagues addressed these oversights in their study.In a sample of 13 people, the authors observed that foveal vision was impacted by crowding and that, unlike peripheral vision, fixational eye movements played a role in the effects they observed by introducing spatial uncertainty and worsening crowding effects on vision.This is likely due to the fact that foveal crowding neural pooling regions have the smallest receptive fields, which over time get stimulated both by the target and nearby distractors as a result of fixational eye motion.These findings extend our understanding of visual crowding and thus advance the field.