Ladder contours are undetectable in the periphery: A crowding effect?
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We studied the perceptual integration of contours consisting of Gabor elements positioned along a smooth path, embedded among distractor elements. Contour elements either formed tangents to the path ("snakes") or were perpendicular to it ("ladders"). Perfectly straight snakes and ladders were easily detected in the fovea but, at an eccentricity of 6 degrees , only the snakes were detectable. The disproportionate impairment of peripheral ladder detection remained when we brought foveal performance away from ceiling by jittering the orientations of the elements. We propose that the failure to detect peripheral ladders is a form of crowding, the phenomenon observed when identification of peripherally located letters is disrupted by flanking letters. D. G. Pelli, M. Palomares, and N. J. Majaj (2004) outlined a model in which simple feature detectors are followed by integration fields, which are involved in tasks, such as letter identification, that require the outputs of several detectors. They proposed that crowding occurs because small integration fields are absent from the periphery, leading to inappropriate feature integration by large peripheral integration fields. We argue that the "association field," which has been proposed to mediate contour integration (D. J. Field, A. Hayes, & R. F. Hess, 1993), is a type of integration field. Our data are explained by an elaboration of Pelli et al.'s model, in which weak ladder integration competes with strong snake integration. In the fovea, the association fields were small, and the model integrated snakes and ladders with little interference. In the periphery, the association fields were large, and integration of ladders was severely disrupted by interference from spurious snake contours. In contrast, the model easily detected snake contours in the periphery. In a further demonstration of the possible link between contour integration and crowding, we ran our contour integration model on groups of three-letter stimuli made from short line segments. Our model showed several key properties of crowding: The critical spacing for crowding to occur was independent of the size of the target letter, scaled with eccentricity, and was greater on the peripheral side of the target.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it