Journal of neurophysiology
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Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative Study
Object-level visual information gets through the bottleneck of crowding.
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. ⋯ 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.