Department of Psychology, 3210 Tolman Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
J Neurophysiol. 2011 Sep;106(3):1389-98. doi: 10.1152/jn.00904.2010. Epub 2011 Jun 15.
Natural visual scenes are cluttered. In such scenes, many objects in the periphery can be crowded, blocked from identification, simply because of the dense array of clutter. Outside of the fovea, crowding constitutes the fundamental limitation on object recognition and is thought to arise from the limited resolution of the neural mechanisms that select and bind visual features into coherent objects. Thus it is widely believed that in the visual processing stream, a crowded object is reduced to a collection of dismantled features with no surviving holistic properties. Here, we show that this is not so: an entire face can survive crowding and contribute its holistic attributes to the perceived average of the set, despite being blocked from recognition. Our results show that crowding does not dismantle high-level object representations to their component features.
自然视觉场景是杂乱无章的。在这样的场景中，许多外围的物体可能会拥挤在一起，无法被识别，仅仅是因为杂乱无章的排列。在中央凹之外，拥挤是物体识别的基本限制，据认为这是由于选择和结合视觉特征形成连贯物体的神经机制的分辨率有限造成的。因此，人们普遍认为，在视觉处理流中，一个拥挤的物体被简化为一个没有幸存整体属性的拆卸特征的集合。在这里，我们表明并非如此：即使一个完整的面部被遮挡而无法被识别，它也能在拥挤的情况下存活下来，并将其整体属性贡献给所感知的集合平均值。我们的结果表明，拥挤不会将高级物体表示分解为其组成特征。
