Ariely D
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 38 Memorial Dr., E56-329, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2001 Mar;12(2):157-62. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00327.
Sets of similar objects are common occurrences--a crowd of people, a bunch of bananas, a copse of trees, a shelf of books, a line of cars. Each item in the set may be distinct, highly visible, and discriminable. But when we look away from the set, what information do we have? The current article starts to address this question by introducing the idea of a set representation. This idea was tested using two new paradigms: mean discrimination and member identification. Three experiments using sets of different-sized spots showed that observers know a set's mean quite accurately but know little about the individual items, except their range. Taken together, these results suggest that the visual system represents the overall statistical, and not individual, properties of sets.
相似物体的集合是常见的现象——一群人、一串香蕉、一小片树林、一架子书、一排汽车。集合中的每个物品可能都是独特的、非常显眼且可区分的。但是当我们把目光从集合上移开时，我们拥有什么信息呢？当前这篇文章通过引入集合表征的概念开始探讨这个问题。这个概念通过两种新的范式进行了测试：均值辨别和成员识别。三项使用不同大小斑点集合的实验表明，观察者相当准确地知道集合的均值，但除了其范围之外，对单个物品了解甚少。综合起来，这些结果表明视觉系统表征的是集合的整体统计属性，而非个体属性。
