  Clusters of fast and slow correlated particles, identified as dynamical
heterogeneities (DHs), con-stitute a central aspect of glassy dynamics. A key
ingredient of the glass transition scenario is asignificant increase of the
cluster size $\xi$4 as the transition is approached. In need of
easy-to-computetools to measure $\xi$4 , the dynamical susceptibility $\chi$4
was introduced recently, and used in various ex-perimental works to probe DHs.
Here, we investigate DHs in dense microgel suspensions using imagecorrelation
analysis, and compute both $\chi$4 and the four-point correlation function G4 .
The spatialdecrease of G4 provides a direct access to $\xi$4 , which is found
to grow significantly with increasingvolume fraction. However, this increase is
not captured by $\chi$4 . We show that the assumptions thatvalidate the
connection between $\chi$4 and $\xi$4 are not fulfilled in our experiments.
