Vision Sciences Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, William James Hall, Room 760, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2011 Mar;15(3):122-31. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2011.01.003. Epub 2011 Feb 2.
The visual system can only accurately represent a handful of objects at once. How do we cope with this severe capacity limitation? One possibility is to use selective attention to process only the most relevant incoming information. A complementary strategy is to represent sets of objects as a group or ensemble (e.g. represent the average size of items). Recent studies have established that the visual system computes accurate ensemble representations across a variety of feature domains and current research aims to determine how these representations are computed, why they are computed and where they are coded in the brain. Ensemble representations enhance visual cognition in many ways, making ensemble coding a crucial mechanism for coping with the limitations on visual processing.
视觉系统一次只能准确地表示少数几个物体。我们如何应对这种严重的能力限制呢？一种可能性是使用选择性注意只处理最相关的输入信息。另一种补充策略是将一组物体表示为一个整体或集合（例如，表示项目的平均大小）。最近的研究已经证实，视觉系统在各种特征域中计算出准确的整体表示，目前的研究旨在确定这些表示是如何计算的、为什么要计算以及它们在大脑中的何处编码。整体表示在许多方面增强了视觉认知，使得整体编码成为应对视觉处理限制的关键机制。
