Quality of average representation can be enhanced by refined individual items
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Quality of average representation can be enhanced by refined individual items Jihong Lee 1 & Sang Chul Chong 1,2 Accepted: 6 September 2020 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Ensemble perception is efficient because it summarizes redundant and complex information. However, it loses the fine details of individual items during the averaging process. Such characteristics of ensemble perception are similar to those of coarse processing. Here, we tested whether extracting an average of a set was similar to coarse processing. To manipulate coarse processing, we used the fast flicker adaptation known as suppressing coarse information processed by the magnocellular pathway. We hypothesized that if computing the average of a set relied on coarse processing, the precision of an averaging task should decrease after adaptation compared to baseline (no-adaptation). Across experiments with various features (orientation in Experiment 1, size in Experiment 2, and facial expression in Experiment 3), we found that suppressing coarse information did not disrupt the performance of the averaging tasks. Rather, adaptation increased the precision of mean representation. The precision of mean representation might have increased because fine information was relatively enhanced after adaptation. Our results suggest that the quality of ensemble representation relies on that of individual items. Keywords Ensemble perception . Averaging . Coarse processing . Fast flicker adaptation
Introduction Economical management of resources is a virtue not only in our ordinary life but also in cognitive life. Humans efficiently manage their limited resources using various strategies. For example, imagine that you were a farmer waiting for grapes to ripen and trying to determine when to begin harvesting. You might check the sizes and colors of grapes immediately in front of you. However, if you were facing a vast vineyard, looking wider and seeing the overall sizes and colors of the vineyard would be a better strategy than focusing on a specific bunch of grapes. This cognitive management is known as ensemble perception, a strategy of managing cognitive resources economically. To summarize multiple stimuli in a scene, it is helpful to distribute one’s attention over them rather than focusing on them individually (Baek & Chong, 2020a,
* Sang Chul Chong [email protected] 1
Graduate Program in Cognitive Science, Yonsei University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
2
Department of Psychology, Yonsei University, 50 Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul 03722, Republic of Korea
2020b; Chong & Evans, 2011; Chong & Treisman, 2005; Treisman, 2006). Using this strategy, people can rapidly extract summary statistics of multiple stimuli such as mean and variance (Chong & Treisman, 2003; Morgan, Chubb, & Solomon, 2008). This mode is efficient because it helps us to grasp the gist of a scene rapidly (Alvarez, 2011; Cohen, Dennett, & Kanwisher, 2016; Hochstein, 2019; Hochstein, Pavlovskaya, Bonneh, & Soroker, 2015). Traditionally, perceiving the gist of a scene has b
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