Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Scarborough, Scarborough, Canada.
J Vis. 2024 Jun 3;24(6):5. doi: 10.1167/jov.24.6.5.
Ensemble processing allows the visual system to condense visual information into useful summary statistics (e.g., average size), thereby overcoming capacity limitations to visual working memory and attention. To examine the role of attention in ensemble processing, we conducted three experiments using a novel paradigm that merged the action effect (a manipulation of attention) and ensemble processing. Participants were instructed to make a simple action if the feature of a cue word corresponded to a subsequent shape. Immediately after, they were shown an ensemble display of eight ovals of varying sizes and were asked to report either the average size of all ovals or the size of a single oval from the set. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were cued with a task-relevant feature, and in Experiment 3, participants were cued with a task-irrelevant feature. Overall, the task-relevant cues that elicited an action influenced reports of average size in the ensemble phase more than the cues that were passively viewed, whereas task-irrelevant cues did not bias the reports of average size. The results of this study suggest that attention influences ensemble processing only when it is directed toward a task-relevant feature.
集合处理使视觉系统能够将视觉信息浓缩为有用的摘要统计信息（例如，平均值），从而克服了视觉工作记忆和注意力的容量限制。为了研究注意力在集合处理中的作用，我们使用了一种新颖的范式进行了三项实验，该范式将动作效应（注意力的一种操作）和集合处理融合在一起。参与者被指示如果提示词的特征与后续形状相对应，则执行一个简单的动作。之后，他们会看到一个由八个不同大小的椭圆形组成的集合显示，并被要求报告所有椭圆形的平均大小或集合中单个椭圆形的大小。在实验 1 和实验 2 中，参与者都用与任务相关的特征进行提示，而在实验 3 中，参与者用与任务无关的特征进行提示。总的来说，引发动作的与任务相关的提示比被动观察的提示对集合阶段的平均大小报告的影响更大，而与任务无关的提示则不会影响平均大小的报告。这项研究的结果表明，只有当注意力指向与任务相关的特征时，它才会影响集合处理。
