The Whole Warps the Sum of Its Parts

Abstract

The efficiency of averaging properties of sets without encoding redundant details is analogous to gestalt proposals that perception is parsimoniously organized as a function of recurrent order in the world. This similarity suggests that grouping and averaging are part of a broader set of strategies allowing the visual system to circumvent capacity limitations. To examine how gestalt grouping affects the manner in which information is averaged and remembered, I compared the error in observers' adjustments of remembered sizes of individual circles in two different mean-size sets defined by similarity, proximity, connectedness, or a common region. Overall, errors were more similar within the same gestalt-defined groups than between different gestalt-defined groups, such that the remembered sizes of individual circles were biased toward the mean size of their respective gestalt-defined groups. These results imply that gestalt grouping facilitates perceptual averaging to minimize the error with which individual items are encoded, thereby optimizing the efficiency of visual short-term memory.

Tracking two pleasures

“…Unbiased reporting of each pleasure and the average of both when viewing two images People are biased toward the average of an array when reporting properties (e.g., size or color) of a single item (Brady & Alvarez, 2011;Corbett, 2017;Haberman & Whitney, 2009;Maule et al, 2014;Parkes et al, 2001). So far, it has not been assessed whether people have a similar bias when reporting their subjective feelings about a stimulus.…”

“…Their findings could not be explained by supposing that observers simply make noisy measurements of each individual face's emotion. When estimating the size of a single dot, observers' estimates are biased toward the average size of all presented dots (Brady & Alvarez, 2011;Corbett, 2017). People are also biased to mistake the average color of two simultaneously presented color patches as being one of the originally presented colors (Maule et al, 2014).…”

Set similarity modulates object tracking in dynamic environments

“…Along these lines, the visual system relies on a default set of heuristic regularities in the external environment to guide the formation of initial perceptual chunks, which pragmatically constrain further processing (e.g., Wertheimer, 1938 ). These perceptual chunks likely consist of sparse statistical representations of redundant information (Corbett, 2017 ). Toward furthering our understanding of how the limited-capacity visual system relies on such higher order regularities to organize and segregate information in dynamic environments, we examined how observers utilized grouping by similarity to track a target within a display composed of one or more subsets of objects.…”

“…Similarly, Brady and Tenenbaum ( 2013 ) reported that grouping by similarity and proximity improved change-detection performance compared with performance with arrays that did not contain Gestalt grouping cues. More recently, Corbett ( 2017 ) reported that when observers viewed study displays of heterogeneously sized circles organized into two different Gestalt-defined mean size groups, followed by test displays of a subset of homogeneously sized circles and were asked to adjust the test circles to the remembered sizes of the corresponding circles in the study displays, they made more similar (correlated) errors for test circles in the same Gestalt-defined groups. Their adjustments of physically identical test circles were also biased toward the mean sizes of the corresponding Gestalt-defined group mean sizes.…”

“…Whereas there is mounting evidence to suggest that grouping objects reduces the amount of resources needed for encoding and increases the amount of information that can be stored in VSTM (e.g., Brady & Tenenbaum, 2013 ; Corbett, 2017 ; Gao et al, 2011 ; Peterson, Gozenman, Arciniega, & Berryhill, 2015 ; Woodman et al, 2003 ; Xu & Chun, 2007 ), it remains unclear whether such benefits arise from an increased ability to process more individual objects or from a facilitation of processing over entire groups of objects. Gestalt grouping can modulate what is considered to be the basic unit of processing, from single objects to collections or groups of objects (e.g., Scholl, 2001 ; Yantis, 1992 ), such that information about an entire group can be accessed based on a single feature value (e.g., all red items; Huang, 2010 ; Huang & Pashler, 2007 ).…”