Ensemble perception of duration and size

This study investigated ensemble perception of temporal (duration) as well as spatial (size) information with simultaneously and sequentially presented ensembles of different set size. The results showed that summary statistics can be extracted from temporal ensembles as well as from size ensembles, irrespective of whether the ensembles are presented simultaneously or sequentially, demonstrating the domain generality of ensemble perception. Nevertheless, the results also indicate clear domain-specific differences between the two dimensions. For simultaneous ensembles, mean estimates increased with set size for duration ensembles and decreased with set size for size ensembles, suggesting a possible bias by dimension-specific features; in the case of duration by the interoffset intervals, and in the case of size by the overall ensemble size. For sequential ensembles, there was a recency effect for size stimuli but not for duration stimuli, suggesting that the information is integrated for the two dimensions differently. For example, participants might rely on an internal prior formed by memory mixing more strongly in the case of relatively noisy representations of temporal information.