Quinlan Philip T, Cohen Dale J, Allen Keith
Department of Psychology, The University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD, UK.
Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Wilmington, NC, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2025 Feb;87(2):698-711. doi: 10.3758/s13414-024-03005-2. Epub 2025 Jan 10.
Here we report four experiments that explore the nature of perceptual averaging. We examine the evidence that participants recover and store a representation of the mean value of a set of perceptual features that are distributed across the optic array. The extant evidence shows that participants are particularly accurate in estimating the relevant mean value, but we ask whether this might be due to processes that reflect assessing featural similarity rather than computing an average. We set out and test detailed predictions that can be used to adjudicate between these averaging and similarity hypotheses. In each experiment, a memory display of randomly positioned bars was briefly presented followed immediately by a probe bar. Participants had to report in a Yes/No task whether the probed feature value was present. In initial experiments, we examine reports of the orientation of white bars and of the color of vertical bars. Then, in companion experiments, we examine reports of the orientation of bars whose color vary, and of the color of bars whose orientation varies. In this way, we test ideas about whether perceptual averaging occurs on a featural dimension that is irrelevant to the task. Currently, it is not known whether perceptual averaging only takes place on a task-relevant dimension or whether it operates more widely.
在此，我们报告四项探索知觉平均性质的实验。我们考察了相关证据，即参与者恢复并存储了一组分布在视阵列中的知觉特征的平均值表征。现有证据表明，参与者在估计相关平均值时特别准确，但我们要问这是否可能是由于反映特征相似性评估而非计算平均值的过程所致。我们提出并测试了详细的预测，这些预测可用于在这些平均假设和相似性假设之间进行裁决。在每个实验中，先短暂呈现一个由随机定位的条形组成的记忆显示，紧接着呈现一个探测条形。参与者必须在一个是/否任务中报告探测到的特征值是否存在。在最初的实验中，我们考察关于白色条形的方向以及垂直条形的颜色的报告。然后，在配套实验中，我们考察颜色不同的条形的方向报告以及方向不同的条形的颜色报告。通过这种方式，我们测试关于知觉平均是否发生在与任务无关的特征维度上的观点。目前，尚不清楚知觉平均是否仅发生在与任务相关的维度上，还是其作用范围更广。
