[visionlist] Journal of Vision - Call for Papers - Special Issue on Crowding

[Journal of Vision]

Crowding: Including illusory conjunctions, surround suppression, and attention

Clutter impairs object perception. Long-range effects of non-overlapping distractors can greatly alter the appearance of an object and make it unrecognizable. A century of thoughtful empirical work has focused on crowding as a peripheral impairment, but this focus has now broadened dramatically. Recently, many have realized that the difficulties of seeing in a cluttered environment, whether they result in reading errors, illusory conjunctions, or surround suppression, may share the same underlying cause. These various manifestations of crowding may all be due to an inappropriate integration of features, hindering identification of the object.

Scientists in many fields have independently discovered and exploited these effects to tackle object recognition. Ophthalmologists noticed "crowding" in amblyopia and in peripheral acuity testing. Physiologists found "non-classical receptive fields" and "surround suppression" in single-unit recordings from cat and monkey, and psychophysicists find analogous effects in human vision. Psychologists discovered crowding effects with gratings, words, and faces. Cognitive scientists found the "illusory conjunctions" of features predicted by the Feature Integration Theory of attention. Crowding is proving to be rich ground, but who will strike gold?

We invite submissions, from any field, exploring crowding or crowding-like phenomena to expose the visual computation that recognizes objects.

We particularly welcome articles that might resolve a controversy that divides two of the editors: What is the role of attention, if any, in crowding? At one extreme, Cavanagh claims that crowding measures the "spatial resolution of attention". At the opposite extreme, Pelli asserts that crowding limits all vision and has nothing to do with attention.

Authors are invited to announce (in forthcoming calls for papers for this issue) their intention to contribute, in order to encourage others.

Guest Editors:

Denis Pelli		New York University			denis.pelli at nyu.edu
Patrick Cavanagh  	Harvard University			patrick at wjh.harvard.edu
Robert Desimone	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	desimone at mit.edu
Bosco Tjan	University of Southern California		btjan at usc.edu
Anne Treisman	Princeton University			treisman at princeton.edu

Deadline for submissions:	June 1, 2006
Target publication date:	October 1, 2006

Journal of Vision is an online, open-access journal that encourages the use of images, color, movies, hyperlinks, and other digital enhancements. To submit a paper to this special issue please follow the instructions  at http://journalofvision.org/info/info_for_authors.aspx.