Choi Yong Min, Golomb Julie D
Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2024 Nov;86(8):2740-2760. doi: 10.3758/s13414-024-02963-x. Epub 2024 Oct 9.
Our visual world consists of multiple objects, necessitating the identification of individual objects. Nevertheless, the representation of visual objects often exerts influence on each other. Even when we selectively attend to a subset of visual objects, the representations of surrounding items are encoded and influence the processing of the attended item(s). However, it remains unclear whether the effect of group ensemble representation on individual item representation occurs at the perceptual encoding phase, during the memory maintenance period, or both. Therefore, the current study conducted visual psychophysics experiments to investigate the contributions of perceptual and mnemonic bias on the observed effect of ensemble representation on individual size representation. Across five experiments, we found a consistent pattern of repulsive ensemble bias, such that the size of an individual target circle was consistently reported to be smaller than it actually was when presented alongside other circles with larger mean size, and vice versa. There was a perceptual component to the bias, but mnemonic factors also influenced its magnitude. Specifically, the repulsion bias was strongest with a short retention period (0-50 ms), then reduced within a second to a weaker magnitude that remained stable for a longer retention period (5,000 ms). Such patterns of results persisted when we facilitated the processing of ensemble representation by increasing the set size (Experiment 1B) or post-cueing the target circle so that attention was distributed across all items (Experiment 2B).
我们的视觉世界由多个物体组成，这就需要对单个物体进行识别。然而，视觉物体的表征常常会相互影响。即使我们选择性地关注一部分视觉物体，周围物体的表征也会被编码并影响被关注物体的处理。然而，群体整体表征对单个物体表征的影响是发生在感知编码阶段、记忆维持阶段，还是两者皆有，目前尚不清楚。因此，本研究进行了视觉心理物理学实验，以探究感知和记忆偏差对整体表征对个体大小表征的观察效应的作用。在五个实验中，我们发现了一种一致的排斥性整体偏差模式，即当一个单独的目标圆与其他平均尺寸较大的圆一起呈现时，其大小总是被报告为比实际尺寸小，反之亦然。这种偏差存在感知成分，但记忆因素也会影响其程度。具体而言，排斥偏差在短保留期（0 - 50毫秒）时最强，然后在一秒内减弱到较弱的程度，并在较长的保留期（5000毫秒）内保持稳定。当我们通过增加集合大小（实验1B）或对目标圆进行提示以使注意力分布在所有物体上（实验2B）来促进整体表征的处理时，这种结果模式仍然存在。
