Modeling the effect of cortical magnification on feature detection and individuation

Some researchers have argued that visual representations in the periphery differ qualitatively from those in the fovea (e.g., Balas et al., 2009; Freeman and Simoncelli, 2011; Rosenholtz et al., 2012). Consistent with this proposal, He et al. (1997) showed that crowding in the periphery disrupts the ability to individuate features but doesn't disrupt feature detection. We hypothesized that He et al.'s demonstration could be accounted for simply in terms of cortical magnification alone. We tested this hypothesis by presenting He et al.'s stimuli to a neurally realistic model of V1 (Heaton & Hummel, 2022) that incorporates cortical magnification but posits no other differences between foveal and peripheral early visual representations. The model's performance captured He et al.'s findings, suggesting that cortical magnification alone is sufficient to account for the differences between foveal and peripheral visual perception.