It is now emerging that vision is usually limited by object spacing rather than size. The visual system recognizes an object by detecting and then combining its features. 'Crowding' occurs when objects are too close together and features from several objects are combined into a jumbled percept. Here, we review the explosion of studies on crowding--in grating discrimination, letter and face recognition, visual search, selective attention, and reading--and find a universal principle, the Bouma law. The critical spacing required to prevent crowding is equal for all objects, although the effect is weaker between dissimilar objects. Furthermore, critical spacing at the cortex is independent of object position, and critical spacing at the visual field is proportional to object distance from fixation. The region where object spacing exceeds critical spacing is the 'uncrowded window'. Observers cannot recognize objects outside of this window and its size limits the speed of reading and search.

中文翻译：

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未被拥挤的物体识别窗口。

现在已经出现了视觉通常受对象间距而不是大小限制的问题。视觉系统通过检测然后组合其特征来识别对象。当对象太靠近并且将多个对象的要素组合成混乱的感觉时，就会发生“拥挤”。在这里，我们回顾了关于拥挤的研究的激增-光栅判别，字母和面部识别，视觉搜索，选择性注意和阅读-并找到了普遍原则-布马法则。防止拥挤所需的临界间距对于所有物体都是相等的，尽管不同物体之间的效果较弱。此外，皮层上的临界间距与物体位置无关，而视野上的临界间距与距固定位置的物体距离成比例。物体间距超过临界间距的区域是“未拥挤的窗户”。观察者无法识别此窗口之外的对象，并且其大小限制了读取和搜索的速度。