[visionlist] Call for abstracts - Crowding symposium at ECVP 2008

[Denis Pelli]

We invite you to submit an abstract for a proposed Crowding symposium  
in honor of Herman Bouma to be held at the European Conference on  
Visual Perception (ECVP) in Utrecht, the Netherlands, August 24-28,  
2008.

- Denis G. Pelli & Frans W. Cornelissen, symposium organizers.

CROWDING

In the periphery, a visual object that is easily recognized when shown  
in isolation is hard to identify when surrounded by other objects.  
This is "crowding". Diverse studies of crowding come together to  
reveal one universal story: to be identified, simple objects must be  
separated by at least the observer's critical spacing -- as reported  
in the pioneering work of Herman Bouma in the 1970's. Recent work  
confirms Bouma's claim that crowding severely limits the rates of  
reading and searching. While the phenomenon of crowding has been well  
described, theoretical understanding of it is still tentative. For  
instance, it has been suggested that crowding may be feature  
integration for object recognition, or compulsory averaging for  
texture perception.

We invite contributions to this symposium that help to expose the  
mechanics and functional significance of crowding. Contributions are  
welcome from any field.

Herman Bouma has agreed to give a short historical presentation of his  
original observations on crowding.

If you are interested in participating in this symposium (subject to  
approval by ECVP), please send us a tentative title and abstract  
(which can be changed until March 30th). There will be at least four  
15-minute presentations, chosen by the organizers to achieve the best  
symposium, considering the quality of both the abstracts per se and  
the symposium as a whole. Speakers should plan to come to ECVP 2008,  
August 24-28, as normal participants, as there is no special funding  
for symposium speakers. ECVP abstracts have a maximum length of 170  
words (excluding title, authors, affiliation, and funding  
acknowledgments). Feel free to add anything, in your email, to help us  
reach a positive decision on your contribution.

We must receive your abstract by February 25, 2008 in order to meet  
the ECVP symposium-proposal deadline. You will be notified of our  
decision by March 10, 2008. If not included in the symposium, we  
encourage you to submit your abstract to ECVP by their deadline of  
March 30, 2008. http://ecvp.org

Thanks. We hope to hear from you,

Denis & Frans

Denis G. Pelli
Professor of Psychology and Neural Science, New York University
http://www.psych.nyu.edu/pelli/
denis.pelli at nyu.edu

Frans W. Cornelissen
Laboratory for Experimental Ophthalmology, University Medical Centre  
Groningen
http://cornelis.med.rug.nl/leo/people/frans/
f.w.cornelissen at rug.nl