Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Seeing sets: representation by statistical properties.

D Ariely1

  • 1Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 38 Memorial Dr., E56-329, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA. ariely@mit.edu

Psychological Science
|May 9, 2001
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Ectrodactyly-ectodermal dysplasia-cleft lip and palate syndrome in twins.

Annals of plastic surgery·2001
Same author

Beautiful faces have variable reward value: fMRI and behavioral evidence.

Neuron·2001
Same author

A timely account of the role of duration in decision making.

Acta psychologica·2001
Same author

When does duration matter in judgment and decision making?

Journal of experimental psychology. General·2001
Same author

Joint comment on "when does duration matter in judgment and decision making?" (Ariely & Loewenstein, 2000).

Journal of experimental psychology. General·2001
Same author

The effects of averaging subjective probability estimates between and within judges.

Journal of experimental psychology. Applied·2000

Our visual system accurately perceives the average of object sets but struggles with individual item details. This suggests we process statistical set properties rather than exact item information.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Visual Perception
  • Information Processing

Background:

  • Sets of visually similar objects are ubiquitous in daily life.
  • Understanding how humans represent information about these sets after viewing is crucial.
  • Existing research often focuses on individual object recognition, not set-level processing.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To introduce and test the concept of a 'set representation' in visual perception.
  • To investigate whether the visual system prioritizes global statistical properties or individual item details of a set.

Main Methods:

  • Development of two novel experimental paradigms: mean discrimination and member identification.
  • Conducting three experiments using sets of varying sizes of visual stimuli (spots).

Related Experiment Videos

  • Quantitative analysis of observer performance in judging set means and identifying individual members.

    • Main Results:

    • Participants demonstrated high accuracy in determining the mean of object sets.
    • Knowledge of individual item properties was limited, with range being the primary discernible feature.
    • Performance varied based on set size, indicating sensitivity to statistical distributions.

    Conclusions:

    • The visual system appears to form a 'set representation' that captures statistical regularities.
    • Evidence suggests a preference for processing global, summary statistics over individual item data.
    • This finding has implications for understanding visual attention and memory for object ensembles.