In visual crowding, the perception of a target deteriorates in the presence of nearby flankers. Traditionally, target-flanker interactions have been considered as local, mostly deleterious, low-level, and feature specific, occurring when information is pooled along the visual processing hierarchy. Recently, a vast literature of high-level effects in crowding (grouping effects and face-holistic crowding in particular) led to a different understanding of crowding, as a global, complex, and multilevel phenomenon that cannot be captured or explained by simple pooling models. It was recently argued that these high-level effects may still be captured by more sophisticated pooling models, such as the Texture Tiling model (TTM). Unlike simple pooling models, the high-dimensional pooling stage of the TTM preserves rich information about a crowded stimulus and, in principle, this information may be sufficient to drive high-level and global aspects of crowding. In addition, it was proposed that grouping effects in crowding may be explained by post-perceptual target cueing. Here, we extensively tested the predictions of the TTM on the results of six different studies that highlighted high-level effects in crowding. Our results show that the TTM cannot explain any of these high-level effects, and that the behavior of the model is equivalent to a simple pooling model. In addition, we show that grouping effects in crowding cannot be predicted by post-perceptual factors, such as target cueing. Taken together, these results reinforce once more the idea that complex target-flanker interactions determine crowding and that crowding occurs at multiple levels of the visual hierarchy.

中文翻译：

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拥挤的全局和高水平效应无法通过高维池化或目标提示来预测。

在视觉拥挤的情况下，如果附近有侧翼，目标的感知就会恶化。传统上，目标侧翼交互被认为是局部的、大多是有害的、低级的和特定于特征的，当信息沿着视觉处理层次结构汇集时发生。最近，关于拥挤的高级效应（尤其是分组效应和面部整体拥挤）的大量文献导致了对拥挤的不同理解，拥挤是一种全局的、复杂的、多层次的现象，无法用简单的池化模型捕获或解释。最近有人认为，这些高级效果仍然可以通过更复杂的池化模型来捕获，例如纹理平铺模型（TTM）。与简单的池化模型不同，TTM 的高维池化阶段保留了有关拥挤刺激的丰富信息，原则上，这些信息可能足以驱动拥挤的高级和全局方面。此外，有人提出，拥挤中的分组效应可以通过后知觉目标提示来解释。在这里，我们根据六项不同研究的结果广泛测试了 TTM 的预测，这些研究强调了拥挤的高级影响。我们的结果表明，TTM 无法解释任何这些高级效应，并且该模型的行为相当于简单的池模型。此外，我们表明，拥挤中的分组效应不能通过后感知因素（例如目标提示）来预测。总而言之，这些结果再次强化了这样的观点：复杂的目标-侧翼相互作用决定了拥挤，并且拥挤发生在视觉层次的多个层面。