The Pervasiveness of Ensemble Perception

Abstract

This Element outlines the recent understanding of ensemble representations in perception in a holistic way aimed to engage the general audience, novel and expert alike. The Element highlights the ubiquitous nature of this summary process, paving the way for a discussion of the theoretical and cortical underpinnings, and why ensemble encoding should be considered a basic, inherently necessary component of human perception. Following an overview of the topic, including a brief history of the field, the Element introduces overarching themes and a corresponding outline of the present work.

Neural representations of statistical and rule‐based predictions in Gilles de la Tourette syndrome

“…When the brain represents a set of similar stimuli as a unified percept based on their summary statistics (i.e., mean, range, variance, etc. ), those are often referred to as set or ‘ensemble representations’ (Ariely, 2001; Bayne & McClelland, 2019; Corbett et al, 2023). Ensembles compress real‐life experiences by collapsing similar and redundant information while integrating them into preexisting internal models of environmental statistics (Hansmann‐Roth et al, 2021; Khayat et al, 2023).…”

“…When the brain represents a set of similar stimuli as a unified percept based on their summary statistics (i.e., mean, range, variance, etc. ), those are often referred to as set or 'ensemble representations' (Ariely, 2001;Bayne & McClelland, 2019;Corbett et al, 2023).…”

A general ability for judging simple and complex ensembles.

“…Interestingly, the influence of late noise should increase as the set size (and cognitive load) increases. Some authors (Corbett et al, 2023) have questioned our prior claims of domain-general influences in EP (Chang & Gauthier, 2022) on the basis that our set sizes may not have been large enough to tap "true" EP. However, at least according to Baek and Chong (2020), larger set sizes should increase the influence of late noise, and thus would only increase domain-general effects.…”

The functional role of spatial anisotropies in ensemble perception

“…It is believed that ensemble statistics are extracted within a few milliseconds and beyond the bottleneck of attention and single-object recognition [ 2 , 4 – 9 ]. The rapid extraction of ensemble statistics supports fundamental visual functions, such as gist perception [ 10 , 11 ], grouping [ 12 – 16 ], and visual search [ 17 – 19 ], but the underlying mechanisms are still debated [ 3 , 20 ]. In particular, it remains unclear how the visual system integrates information from local elements dispersed over the entire visual field.…”