It is rare to find a crowding manuscript that fails to mention "Bouma's law," the rule of thumb stating that flankers within a distance of about one half of the target eccentricity will induce crowding. Here we investigate the generality of this rule (even for just optotypes), the factors that modulate the critical spacing, and the evidence for the rule in Bouma's own data. We explore these questions by reanalyzing a variety of studies from the literature, running several new control experiments, and by utilizing a model that unifies flanked identification measurements between psychophysical paradigms. Specifically, with minimal assumptions (equivalent psychometric slopes across conditions, for example), crowded acuity can be predicted for arbitrary target sizes and flanker spacings, revealing a performance "landscape" that delineates the critical spacing. Last, we present a compact quantitative summary of the effects of different types of stimulus manipulations on optotype crowding.

中文翻译：

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拥挤视标临界间距的普遍性：从布马到 21 世纪。


很少有一份拥挤的手稿不提到“布马定律”，该法则指出，在目标偏心率大约一半的距离内进行侧翼进攻将引起拥挤。在这里，我们研究了该规则的普遍性（即使只是视标）、调节临界间距的因素以及 Bouma 自己的数据中该规则的证据。我们通过重新分析文献中的各种研究、运行几个新的控制实验以及利用统一心理物理学范式之间的侧翼识别测量的模型来探索这些问题。具体来说，通过最小的假设（例如，不同条件下的等效心理测量斜率），可以预测任意目标尺寸和侧翼间距的拥挤敏锐度，从而揭示描绘临界间距的性能“景观”。最后，我们对不同类型的刺激操纵对视标拥挤的影响进行了紧凑的定量总结。