Letters Lost: Capturing Appearance in Crowded Peripheral Vision Reveals a New Kind of Masking

Peripheral vision is strongly limited by crowding, the deleterious influence of flanking items on target perception. Distinguishing what is seen from what is merely inferred in crowding is difficult because task demands and prior knowledge may influence observers’ reports. Here, we used a standard identification task in which participants were susceptible to these influences, and to minimize them, we used a free-report-and-drawing paradigm. Three letters were presented in the periphery. In Experiment 1, 10 participants were asked to identify the central target letter. In Experiment 2, 25 participants freely named and drew what they saw. When three identical letters were presented, performance was almost perfect in Experiment 1, but it was very poor in Experiment 2, in which most participants reported only two letters. Our study reveals limitations of standard crowding paradigms and uncovers a hitherto unrecognized effect that we call redundancy masking.

Peter the Venerable on the Talmud, the Jews, and Islam

It is largely for his attack upon the Talmud that Peter the Venerable’s Adversus Iudeorum inveteratam duritiem stands out. Peter is the first medieval Latin author to name the Talmud as such. Having identified the Talmud as a principal source of Jewish error, Peter condemns its influence upon Jews. In their Talmud, Peter the Venerable insists, Jews even declare that God condemns Christians to Hell “because they do not believe in the Talmud.” Peter views the Talmud not only as a source of error for Jews, however, but also for Muslims. Muḥammad wove the Qurʾān in part, Peter insists, out of the filthy cloth of the Jews’ Talmud. Since he claims that Satan is the ultimate source for Talmudic “lies,” he attributes both the Talmud and the Qurʾān to diabolical agency. This paper examines Peter’s view of the Talmud, then, and its deleterious influence upon both Jews and Muslims.