The right visual field advantage in crowding is specific to letters
Abstract
Visual crowding is the impairment to object recognition caused by similar objects that are too close to the target. Although crowding occurs in many contexts, it is not clear whether the underlying mechanisms are the same for all stimulus categories. One clue is that crowding is sometimes less severe in the right visual hemifield than in the left. However, this hemifield asymmetry has emerged most often in letter identification tasks. Here we investigated whether the hemifield asymmetry is a general attribute of crowding or specific to identifying familiar letters. In three experiments, we precisely measured crowding distances (the spacing between targets and flankers required to reach a threshold level of accuracy) in each hemifield for several types of stimuli: Latin letters, pseudo-letters with matched visual features, Landolt squares, and face icons. For letters only, crowding distances were significantly smaller in the right visual field than in the left. This asymmetry was larger for letters than for all other stimulus types. The asymmetry for letters persisted even when the target letter was flanked by unfamiliar pseudo-letters, demonstrating that it is not simply an advantage for processing strings of letters. Two other findings support stimulus-specific mechanisms: the patterns of flanker substitution errors and across-participant correlations in crowding distances. We propose that reading experience strengthens connections between left-hemisphere language areas and left-hemisphere visual cortex, leading to specific letter-processing mechanisms with more precise spatial tuning in the right visual hemifield.
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BibTeX
@misc{white2026right,
title = {{The right visual field advantage in crowding is specific to letters}},
author = {Alex L. White and Nicole Oppenheimer and Anishka Yerabothu},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/s6qvd_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/s6qvd_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The right visual field advantage in crowding is specific to letters
AU - Alex L. White
AU - Nicole Oppenheimer
AU - Anishka Yerabothu
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/03
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/s6qvd_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/s6qvd_v1/
AB - Visual crowding is the impairment to object recognition caused by similar objects that are too close to the target. Although crowding occurs in many contexts, it is not clear whether the underlying mechanisms are the same for all stimulus categories. One clue is that crowding is sometimes less severe in the right visual hemifield than in the left. However, this hemifield asymmetry has emerged most often in letter identification tasks. Here we investigated whether the hemifield asymmetry is a general attribute of crowding or specific to identifying familiar letters. In three experiments, we precisely measured crowding distances (the spacing between targets and flankers required to reach a threshold level of accuracy) in each hemifield for several types of stimuli: Latin letters, pseudo-letters with matched visual features, Landolt squares, and face icons. For letters only, crowding distances were significantly smaller in the right visual field than in the left. This asymmetry was larger for letters than for all other stimulus types. The asymmetry for letters persisted even when the target letter was flanked by unfamiliar pseudo-letters, demonstrating that it is not simply an advantage for processing strings of letters. Two other findings support stimulus-specific mechanisms: the patterns of flanker substitution errors and across-participant correlations in crowding distances. We propose that reading experience strengthens connections between left-hemisphere language areas and left-hemisphere visual cortex, leading to specific letter-processing mechanisms with more precise spatial tuning in the right visual hemifield.
ER -