Identifying where crowding happens in the brain using MRI

The sense that we are able to see things equally well across our field of view is an illusion. “High resolution” vision is limited to <1% of the field. The remaining “peripheral” vision is quite poor, and is impeded further when the target is surrounded by other objects known as “visual crowding”. However, we know little about where crowding happens in the brain.

In this study our aim is to determine what brain regions are involved in crowding by correlating subjects’ susceptibility to crowding (measured using psychophysics) and cortical architecture, measured using a recently developed functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging technique population receptive field (pRF) mapping.