Whether we're staring at our phones, the page of a book, or the person across the table, the objects of our focus never stand in isolation; there are always other objects or people in our field of vision. How that visual "clutter" affects visual processing in the brain, however, is not well understood. In a new study published Oct.
22 in the journal Neuron , Yale researchers show that this clutter alters how information flows in the brain, as does the precise location of that clutter within the wider field of vision. The findings help clarify the neural basis of perception and offer a deeper understanding of the visual cortex in the brain. "Prior research has shown that visual clutter has an effect on the target of your perception, and to different degrees depending on where that clutter is with respect to where you're currently looking," said Anirvan Nandy, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) and co-senior author of the study.
"So for example, if I'm asked to read the word 'cat' out of the corner of my eye, the letter 't' will have a much greater effect than the letter 'c' in my inability to accurately identify the letter 'a,' even though 'c' and 't' are equidistant from 'a.'" This phenomenon is called "visual crowding," and it's why we can't read out of the corner of our eyes, no matter how hard we try, and why we have a hard time identifying objects when they are located among the clutter at the edge of our vision, said Nandy. For the ne.