Reply to: Failure to replicate a superiority effect in crowding

It is unclear to us why Ozkirli et al.1 fail to replicate our findings2 of higher precision in orientation judgments in the presence of flankers. The authors1 suggest that the use of different groups for the two conditions may have weakened our findings, as thresholds in orientation tasks can vary across participants. They further suggest that using different stimuli for the two conditions may introduce spurious effects. Our original choice was to avoid the repeated presentation of unflanked stimuli of similar orientation could induce response stereotyping3,4. However, we do acknowledge that there may have been an issue, and we have replicated the main effect of improved precision with similar target and flankers, in three ways, twice in the orientation domain and once testing a different attribute, color.