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Ensemble perception: Extracting the average of perceptual versus numerical stimuli
David Rosenbaum1, Vincent de Gardelle2, Marius Usher3
1Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel. davidros28@gmail.com.
Attention, Perception & Psychophysics
|January 4, 2021
Summary
Humans can average visual orientations with high capacity, but averaging numbers is limited. Number averaging precision decreases with more items, unlike orientation averaging, indicating attentional constraints.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Visual Perception
- Numerical Cognition
Background:
- Humans can extract average features from visual arrays and numerical sequences.
- Previous research suggests distinct processing for perceptual and numerical information.
Purpose of the Study:
- To compare the capacity limitations in averaging perceptual features (orientations) versus numerical values (digits).
- To investigate whether number averaging is more constrained by attentional capacity than orientation averaging.
Main Methods:
- Simultaneous presentation of Gabor elements or digits (set sizes 4-12) for 300 ms.
- Observers estimated the average of presented stimuli on a continuous scale.
- Computational modeling was used to determine capacity parameters.
Main Results:
- Orientation averaging precision remained constant with increasing set size.
- Number averaging precision decreased significantly with increasing set size.
- Capacity for orientation averaging (approx. 8 items) exceeded that for number averaging (approx. 4 items).
Conclusions:
- Numerical averaging is more susceptible to capacity and attentional limitations than perceptual averaging.
- Distributed attention was more prevalent in the orientation task compared to the number task.
- These findings support the notion that number processing is more resource-demanding than basic perceptual feature processing.
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