Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, Duke University, USA.
Department of Economics, Duke University, USA.
Cognition. 2021 Sep;214:104756. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104756. Epub 2021 May 8.
The ability to estimate proportions informs our immediate impressions of social environments (e.g., of the diversity of races or genders within a crowded room). This study examines how the distribution of attention during brief glances shapes estimates of group gender proportions. Performance-wise, subjects exhibit a canonical pattern of judgment errors: small proportions are overestimated while large values are underestimated. Subjects' eye movements at sub-second timescales reveal that these biases follow from a tendency to visually oversample members of the gender minority. Rates of oversampling dovetail with average levels of error magnitudes, response variability, and response times. Visual biases are thus associated with the inherent difficulty in estimating particular proportions. All results are replicated at a within-subjects level with non-human ensembles using natural scene stimuli; the observed attentional patterns and judgment biases are thus not exclusively guided by face-specific visual properties. Our results reveal the biased distribution of attention underlying typical judgment errors of group proportions.
估计比例的能力会影响我们对社会环境的直观印象（例如，在拥挤的房间中对不同种族或性别的估计）。本研究考察了在短暂的扫视过程中注意力的分布如何影响对群体性别比例的估计。从表现上看，被试表现出一种典型的判断错误模式：小比例被高估，而大比例被低估。被试在亚秒时间尺度上的眼动揭示了这些偏差源于对性别少数群体成员的视觉过度抽样。抽样率与平均误差幅度、响应变异性和响应时间相吻合。因此，视觉偏差与估计特定比例的固有难度有关。使用自然场景刺激，在非人类集合中以被试内水平复制了所有结果；因此，观察到的注意力模式和判断偏差并非完全由特定于面部的视觉属性指导。我们的研究结果揭示了群体比例典型判断错误背后的有偏差的注意力分布。
