Holistic crowding: selective interference between configural representations of faces in crowded scenes

It is difficult to recognize an object that falls in the peripheral visual field; it is even more difficult when there are other objects surrounding it. This effect, known as crowding, could be due to interactions between the low-level parts or features of the surrounding objects. Here, we investigated whether crowding can also occur selectively between higher level object representations. Many studies have demonstrated that upright faces, unlike most other objects, are coded holistically. Therefore, in addition to featural crowding within a face (M. Martelli, N. J. Majaj, & D. G. Pelli, 2005), we might expect an additional crowding effect between upright faces due to interference between the higher level holistic representations of these faces. In a series of experiments, we tested this by presenting an upright target face in a crowd of additional upright or inverted faces. We found that recognition was more strongly impaired when the target face was surrounded by upright compared to inverted flanker (distractor) faces; this pattern of results was absent when inverted faces and non-face objects were used as targets. This selective crowding of upright faces by other upright faces only occurred when the target-flanker separation was less than half the eccentricity of the target face, consistent with traditional crowding effects (H. Bouma, 1970; D. G. Pelli, M. Palomares, & N. J. Majaj, 2004). Likewise, the selective interference between upright faces did not occur at the fovea and was not a function of the target-flanker similarity, suggesting that crowding-specific processes were responsible. The results demonstrate that crowding can occur selectively between high-level representations of faces and may therefore occur at multiple stages in the visual system.