Five dichotomies in the psychophysics of ensemble perception

Abstract

Whereas psychophysicists may formulate hypotheses about appearance, they can only measure performance. Bias and imprecision in psychophysical data need not necessarily reflect bias and imprecision in perception. Sensory systems may exaggerate the differences between each item and its neighbors in an ensemble. Alternatively, sensory systems may homogenize the ensemble, thereby removing any apparent differences between neighboring items. Ensemble perception may be involuntary when observers attempt to report the identities of individual items. Conversely, when asked to make a (voluntary) decision about the ensemble as a whole, observers may find it very difficult to compute statistics that are based on more than a very small number of individual items. Modeling decisions about prothetic continua, such as size and contrast, can be tricky because sensory signals may be distorted before and/or after voluntarily computing ensemble statistics. With metathetic continua, such as spatial orientation, distortion is less problematic; physically vertical things necessarily appear close to vertical and physically horizontal things necessarily appear close to horizontal. Decision processes are corrupted by noise that, like distortion, may be added to sensory signals prior to and/or after voluntarily computing ensemble statistics.