A Comparison of Foveal and Peripheral Contour Interaction and Crowding.

SIGNIFICANCE: Performance on clinical tests of visual acuity can be influenced by the presence of nearby targets. This study compared the influence of neighboring flanking bars and letters on foveal and peripheral letter identification. PURPOSE: Contour interaction and crowding refer to an impairment of visual resolution or discrimination produced by different types of flanking stimuli. This study compared the impairment of percent correct letter identification that is produced in normal observers when a target letter is surrounded by an array of four flanking bars (contour interaction) or four flanking letters (crowding). METHODS: Performance was measured at the fovea and at eccentricities of 1.25, 2.5, and 5° for photopic (200 cd/m2) and mesopic stimuli (0.5 cd/m2) and a range of target-to-flanker separations. RESULTS: Consistent with previous reports, foveal contour interaction and crowding were more pronounced for photopic than mesopic targets. However, no statistically significant difference existed between foveal contour-interaction and crowding functions at either luminance level. On the other hand, flanking bars produced much less impairment of letter identification than letter flankers at all three peripheral locations, indicating that crowding is more severe than contour interaction in peripheral vision. In contrast to the fovea, peripheral crowding and contour-interaction functions did not differ systematically for targets of photopic and mesopic luminance. CONCLUSION: The similarity between foveal contour interaction and crowding and the dissimilarity between peripheral contour interaction and crowding suggest the involvement of different mechanisms at different retinal locations.

Contour interaction under photopic and scotopic conditions.

In the present study, we asked whether contour interaction undergoes significant changes for different luminance levels in the central and peripheral visual field. This study included nine normal observers at two laboratories (five at Palacky University Olomouc, Czech Republic and four at the University of Houston, USA). Observers viewed a randomly selected Sloan letter surrounded by four equally spaced bars for several separations measured edge-to-edge in min arc. Stimuli were viewed foveally under photopic and mesopic luminances and between 5° and 12° peripherally for four different background luminances of the display monitors, corresponding to photopic, mesopic, scotopic, and dim scotopic levels. The extent of the contour interaction in the fovea is approximately 20 times smaller than in the periphery. Whereas the magnitude of foveal contour interaction markedly decreases with decreasing luminance, no consistent luminance-induced change occurs in peripheral contour interaction. The extent of contour interaction does not scale with the size of the target letter, either in the fovea or peripherally. The results support a neural origin of contour interaction consistent with the properties of center-surround antagonism.