Individual differences in ensemble perception reveal multiple, independent levels of ensemble representation /

Haberman, Jason.

Individual differences in ensemble perception reveal multiple, independent levels of ensemble representation / Jason Haberman, Timothy F. Brady, George A. Alvarez - April 2015 - Journal of Experimental Psychology : General 144 : 2, page 432-440 .

Ensemble perception, including the ability to "see the average" from a group of items, operates in numerous feature domains (size, orientation, speed, facial expression, etc.). Although the ubiquity of ensemble representations is well established, the large-scale cognitive architecture of this process remains poorly defined. We address this using an individual differences approach. In a series of experiments, observers saw groups of objects and reported either a single item from the group or the average of the entire group. High-level ensemble representations (e.g., average facial expression) showed complete independence from low-level ensemble representations (e.g., average orientation). In contrast, low-level ensemble representations (e.g., orientation and color) were correlated with each other, but not with high-level ensemble representations (e.g., facial expression and person identity). These results suggest that there is not a single domain-general ensemble mechanism, and that the relationship among various ensemble representations depends on how proximal they are in representational space.

Psychology


Individual differences.
Perception.
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