Patrick Cavanagh is in the Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. patrick@wjh.harvard.edu
In peripheral vision, individual item information becomes inaccessible in the presence of distractors. Parkes et al. now show this information is not lost, but integrated into accurate ensemble statistics, suggesting that such 'crowding' may be related to texture perception.
