The role of category- and exemplar-specific experience in ensemble processing of objects
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The role of category- and exemplar-specific experience in ensemble processing of objects Oakyoon Cha 1
&
Randolph Blake 1 & Isabel Gauthier 1
Accepted: 21 September 2020 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract People can relatively easily report summary properties for ensembles of objects, suggesting that this information can enrich visual experience and increase the efficiency of perceptual processing. Here, we ask whether the ability to judge diversity within object arrays improves with experience. We surmised that ensemble judgments would be more accurate for commonly experienced objects, and perhaps even more for objects of expertise like faces. We also expected improvements in ensemble processing with practice with a novel category, and perhaps even more with repeated experience with specific exemplars. We compared the effect of experience on diversity judgments for arrays of objects, with participants being tested with either a small number of repeated exemplars or with a large number of exemplars from the same object category. To explore the role of more prolonged experience, we tested participants with completely novel objects (random blobs), with objects familiar at the category level (cars), and with objects with which observers are experts at subordinate-level recognition (faces). For objects that are novel, participants showed evidence of improved ability to distribute attention. In contrast, for object categories with long-term experience, i.e., faces and cars, performance improved during the experiment but not necessarily due to improved ensemble processing. Practice with specific exemplars did not result in better diversity judgments for all object categories. Considered together, these results suggest that ensemble processing improves with experience. However, experience operates rapidly, the role of experience does not rely on exemplar-level knowledge and may not benefit from subordinate-level expertise. Keywords Ensemble perception . Object recognition . Diversity judgment . Experience . Expertise
Introduction We often encounter visual scenes containing multiple objects of the same category, such as faces in a classroom or a cluster of apples in a produce section. Some decisions require impressions of overall properties for such ensembles. For instance, a speaker may try to discern whether or not her audience is generally bored based on their facial expressions and a wheat farmer has to decide whether it is time to harvest his field based on the size and color of the seed heads. What determines someone’s ability to make these kinds of judgments about a congregation, i.e., ensemble, of objects? Based on research in object recognition (Gauthier, 2018), we imagine that both domain-general and domain-specific visual abilities would
* Oakyoon Cha [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, 111 21st Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37240, USA
contribute to performance on ensemble judgments. Recent work reveals the existence of a domain-general object recognition ability
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