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20-10-2023 | Research

How general is ensemble perception?

Auteurs: Ting-Yun Chang, Oakyoon Cha, Rankin McGugin, Andrew Tomarken, Isabel Gauthier

Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research | Uitgave 3/2024

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Abstract

People can summarize features of groups of objects (e.g., the mean size of apples). Claims of dissociations or common mechanisms supporting such ensemble perception (EP) judgments have generally been made on the basis of correlations between pairs of tasks. These correlations can be inflated because they use the same stimuli, summary statistics and/or task format. Performance on EP tasks also correlates with that on object recognition (OR) tasks. Here, we seek evidence for a general EP ability that is also distinct from OR ability. Two-hundred participants completed three tasks that did not overlap in stimuli, summary statistic or task format. Participants performed a diversity comparison for arrays of nonsense blobs, a mean identity judgment with ensembles of Transformer toys, and the novel object memory task with novel objects (NOMT-Greeble). We hypothesized that EP contributes to the first two of these tasks, while OR contributes only to the last two. Performance on the two tasks suggested to tap an EP ability were correlated after controlling for the third task. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test our predictions without the confound of measurement error. Correlations between factors assumed to share influence from EP or from OR were higher than that between the factors that we expect did not share these influences. The results provide the first clear evidence for a domain-general EP ability distinct from OR. We argue that understanding such a general ability will require a change in designs and analytical approaches in the study if individual differences in EP.
Voetnoten
1
We use ‘task’ to denote a relatively broad category of trials that share common features (e.g., face matching and face learning are two face processing tasks) and ‘test’ to denote a specific measurement tool that can be used to compare individuals (e.g., Alice had a better score than Bob on our test of mean judgments for line orientation).
 
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Metagegevens
Titel
How general is ensemble perception?
Auteurs
Ting-Yun Chang
Oakyoon Cha
Rankin McGugin
Andrew Tomarken
Isabel Gauthier
Publicatiedatum
20-10-2023
Uitgeverij
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Gepubliceerd in
Psychological Research / Uitgave 3/2024
Print ISSN: 0340-0727
Elektronisch ISSN: 1430-2772
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01883-z