Ensemble perception includes information from multiple spatial scales
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Ensemble perception includes information from multiple spatial scales Timothy D. Sweeny 1 & Andrew Bates 1 & Elric Elias 2
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Most visual scenes contain information at different spatial scales, including the local and global, or the detail and gist. Global processes have become increasingly implicated in research examining summary statistical perception, initially as the output of ensemble coding, and more recently as a gating mechanism for selecting which information is included in the averaging process itself. Yet local and global processing are known to be rapidly integrated by the visual system, and it is plausible that global-level information, like spatial organization, may be included as an input during ensemble coding. We tested this hypothesis using an ensemble shape-perception task in which observers evaluated the mean aspect ratios of sets of ellipses. In addition to varying the aspect ratios of the individual shapes, we independently varied the spatial arrangements of the sets so that they had either flat or tall organizations at the global level. We found that observers made precise summary judgments about the average aspect ratios of the sets by integrating information from multiple shapes. More importantly, global flat and tall organizations were incorporated into ensemble judgments about the sets; summary judgments were biased in the directions of the global spatial arrangements on each trial. This global-to-local integration even occurred when the global organizations were masked. Our results demonstrate that the process of summary representation can include information from both the local and global scales. The gist is not just an output of ensemble representation – it can be included as an input to the mechanism itself. Keywords Ensemble coding . Summary statistical perception . Shape perception . Global . Local
Introduction Most visual scenes contain information at different spatial scales (Palmer, 1977), including the local and global, or the detail and gist. Curiosity about how information is processed and perceived at these levels has been central to the study of visual perception for just about as long as the field has existed. This is evident in the early work of the Gestaltists (Köhler, 1930; Wertheimer, 1923), as well as in more modern research on perceptual organization (Kimchi, 1994; Wagemans et al., 2012), visual search (Wolfe et al., 2011), scene perception (Brady & Shafer-Skelton, 2017; Oliva & Torralba, 2006), and visual awareness (Hochstein & Ahissar, 2002). Local * Timothy D. Sweeny [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of Denver, 2155 S Race St, Frontier Hall, Denver, CO 80210, USA
2
Department of Psychology, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO, USA
and global information appear to be processed in parallel (Gerlach & Poirel, 2020), and by distinct neural mechanisms (Bijanzadeh et al., 2018; Liu & Luo, 2019) that operate at different timescales. According to Reverse-Hierarchy Theory, global information
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