Multiple concurrent centroid judgments imply multiple within-group salience maps.

Subjects viewed a brief flash of 8-24 dots of either two or three colors randomly arrayed. Their task was to move a mouse cursor to the centroid (center-of-gravity) of each color in a pre-designated order. Conventional and idea-detector analyses show that subjects accurately judged all three centroids utilizing an astounding 13/24 stimulus dots, with only a modest loss of accuracy compared to judging a single-predesignated color centroid. The ability to concurrently compute three centroids is important because it is believed that centroid judgments are made on salience maps that record only salience and are ignorant of the features that produced the salience. Our explanation, instantiated in a computational model of salience processing, is that subjects have three salience maps. Dots are initially segregated into three groups according to color, then each color-group is recorded on a different salience map to compute a centroid. In Part 2, the data are analyzed in terms of Attention Operating Characteristics to characterize impairments in subjects' color-attention filters (mostly insignificant) and encoding efficiency (20% drop for the hardest task) in making multiple versus single centroid judgments. A new, more sensitive analysis measured five sources of subject error variance, four independent, additive sources of error variance: imperfect color-attention filters; a Bayesian-like bias towards a central tendency; storage, retrieval, and cursor misplacement error; a large residual error due mostly to inefficient encoding; and fifth, an interactive source - error in all four components that increases when multiple centroid judgments versus a single centroid judgment are required on each trial. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: An important brain process is a salience map, a representation of the relative importance (salience) of the locations of visual space. It is needed to guide where to look next, for computing the center (technically "centroid") of a cluster of items, and for other important computations. Here we show that in a brief flash of dots of three different colors, randomly interleaved, subjects can compute all three centroids. As a single salience map cannot discriminate dots of different colors, accurately reporting three centroids demonstrates that subjects have not just one, as is commonly believed, but at least three salience maps.