In crowding, perception of a target deteriorates in the presence of nearby flankers. Surprisingly, perception can be rescued from crowding if additional flankers are added (uncrowding). Uncrowding is a major challenge for all classic models of crowding and vision in general, because the global configuration of the entire stimulus is crucial. However, it is unclear which characteristics of the configuration impact (un)crowding. Here, we systematically dissected flanker configurations and showed that (un)crowding cannot be easily explained by the effects of the sub-parts or low-level features of the stimulus configuration. Our modeling results suggest that (un)crowding requires global processing. These results are well in line with previous studies showing the importance of global aspects in crowding.

中文翻译：

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剖析（解除）拥挤。

在拥挤的情况下，如果附近有侧卫，目标的感知就会恶化。令人惊讶的是，如果添加额外的侧翼（疏散），感知可以从拥挤中解救出来。一般来说，疏解对于所有经典的拥挤和视觉模型来说都是一个重大挑战，因为整个刺激的全局配置至关重要。然而，尚不清楚配置的哪些特征会影响（不）拥挤。在这里，我们系统地剖析了侧翼配置，并表明（不）拥挤不能轻易地用刺激配置的子部分或低级特征的影响来解释。我们的建模结果表明（不）拥挤需要全局处理。这些结果与之前的研究非常一致，表明全局因素在拥挤中的重要性。