Informational masking vs. crowding - A mid-level trade-off between auditory and visual processing

In noisy or cluttered environments, sensory cortical mechanisms help combine auditory or visual features into perceived objects. Knowing that individuals vary greatly in their ability to suppress unwanted sensory information, and knowing that the sizes of auditory and visual cortical regions are correlated, we wondered whether there might be a corresponding relation between an individuals ability to suppress auditory vs. visual interference. In auditory masking, background sound makes spoken words unrecognizable. When masking arises due to interference at central auditory processing stages, beyond the cochlea, it is called informational masking (IM). A strikingly similar phenomenon in vision, called visual crowding, occurs when nearby clutter makes a target object unrecognizable, despite being resolved at the retina. We here compare susceptibilities to auditory IM and visual crowding in the same participants. Surprisingly, across participants, we find a negative correlation (R = -0.7) between IM susceptibility and crowding susceptibility: Participants who have low susceptibility to IM tend to have high susceptibility to crowding, and vice versa. This reveals a mid-level trade-off between auditory and visual processing.