Conscious and unconscious processing of ensemble statistics oppositely modulate perceptual decision-making

Our visual system possesses a remarkable ability to extract summary statistical information from groups of similar objects, known as ensemble perception. It remains elusive whether the processing of ensemble statistics exerts influences on our perceptual decision-making and what roles consciousness and attention play in this process. In a series of experiments, we demonstrated that the processing of ensemble statistics can exert significant modulation effects on our perceptual decision-making, which is independent of consciousness but relies on attentional resources. More intriguingly, the conscious and unconscious ensemble representations respectively induce repulsive and attractive modulation effects, with the unconscious effect susceptible to the temporal separation and the distinction between the inducers and the targets. These results not only suggest that the conscious and unconscious ensemble representations engage different visual processing mechanisms but also highlight the distinct roles of consciousness and attention in ensemble perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).