Uncovering foveal crowding

Visual crowding, as context modulation, reduce the ability to recognize objects in clutter, sets a fundamental limit on visual perception and object recognition. It's considered that crowding does not exist in the fovea and extensive efforts explored crowding in the periphery revealed various models that consider several aspects of spatial processing. Studies showed that spatial and temporal crowding are correlated, suggesting a tradeoff between spatial and temporal processing of crowding. We hypothesized that limiting stimulus availability should decrease object recognition in clutter. Here we show, for the first time, that robust contour interactions exist in the fovea for much larger target-flanker spacing than reported previously: participants overcome crowded conditions for long presentations times but exhibit contour interaction effects for short presentation times. Thus, by enabling enough processing time in the fovea, contour interactions can be overcome, enabling object recognition. Our results suggest that contemporary models of context modulation should include both time and spatial processing.