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The pleasure of multiple images Aenne A. Brielmann 1,2

&

Denis G. Pelli 1,3

Accepted: 7 October 2020 # The Author(s) 2020, corrected publication 2020

ABSTRACT How many pleasures can you track? In a previous study, we showed that people can simultaneously track the pleasure they experience from two images. Here, we push further, probing the individual and combined pleasures felt from seeing four images in one glimpse. Participants (N = 25) viewed 36 images spanning the entire range of pleasure. Each trial presented an array of four images, one in each quadrant of the screen, for 200 ms. On 80% of the trials, a central line cue pointed, randomly, at some screen corner either before (precue) or after (postcue) the images were shown. The cue indicated which image (the target) to rate while ignoring the others (distractors). On the other 20% of trials, an X cue requested a rating of the combined pleasure of all four images. Later, for baseline reference, we obtained a single-pleasure rating for each image shown alone. When precued, participants faithfully reported the pleasure of the target. When postcued, however, the mean ratings of images that are intensely pleasurable when seen alone (pleasure >4.5 on a 1–9 scale) dropped below baseline. Regardless of cue timing, the rating of the combined pleasure of four images was a linear transform of the average baseline pleasures of all four images. Thus, while people can faithfully track two pleasures, they cannot track four. Instead, the pleasure of otherwise above-medium-pleasure images is diminished, mimicking the effect of a distracting task. Keywords Precuing . Scene perception . Object recognition In everyday life, we often evaluate how much pleasure we feel from one object among many or the combined pleasure of several objects. Take, for instance, going out to a movie. Most of us feel confident that we can rate how much we enjoyed the movie independent of the comfort of the seats and the taste of the popcorn. At the same time, we also feel able to rate the movie night experience as a whole, taking all its different aspects into account. However, from a scientific standpoint, we do not know whether people can indeed keep track of more than two pleasures independently. And we do The original online version of this article was revised: One of the author’s proof corrections was not carried out by the typesetter. In equation 4 in the inline equation, P and P-bar are mistakenly swapped. The P on the left side of the equal sign should be P-bar, NOT the P in the nominator on the right side. The same inline equation appears correctly above, immediately after Eq. 2. Supplementary Information The online version of this article (https:// doi.org/10.3758/s13414-020-02175-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Aenne A. Brielmann [email protected] 1

Psychology Department, New York University, New York, NY, USA

2

Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany

3

Center for Neural Science, New York Univer