Browsing by Subject "Perceptual averaging"
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Item Open Access Adaptation to average duration(Springer New York LLC, 2021) Corbett, Jennifer E.; Aydın, Berfin; Munneke, JaapThere has been a recent surge of research examining how the visual system compresses information by representing the average properties of sets of similar objects to circumvent strict capacity limitations. Efficient representation by perceptual averaging helps to maintain the balance between the needs to perceive salient events in the surrounding environment and sustain the illusion of stable and complete perception. Whereas there have been many demonstrations that the visual system encodes spatial average properties, such as average orientation, average size, and average numerosity along single dimensions, there has been no investigation of whether the fundamental nature of average representations extends to the temporal domain. Here, we used an adaptation paradigm to demonstrate that the average duration of a set of sequentially presented stimuli negatively biases the perceived duration of subsequently presented information. This negative adaptation aftereffect is indicative of a fundamental visual property, providing the first evidence that average duration is encoded along a single visual dimension. Our results not only have important implications for how the visual system efficiently encodes redundant information to evaluate salient events as they unfold within the dynamic context of the surrounding environment, but also contribute to the long-standing debate regarding the neural underpinnings of temporal encoding.Item Open Access Perceptual averaging in individuals with autism spectrum disorder(Frontiers Research Foundation, 2016) Corbett,, Jennifer Elise; Venuti, P.; Melcher, D.There is mounting evidence that observers rely on statistical summaries of visual information to maintain stable and coherent perception. Sensitivity to the mean (or other prototypical value) of a visual feature (e.g., mean size) appears to be a pervasive process in human visual perception. Previous studies in individuals diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have uncovered characteristic patterns of visual processing that suggest they may rely more on enhanced local representations of individual objects instead of computing such perceptual averages. To further explore the fundamental nature of abstract statistical representation in visual perception, we investigated perceptual averaging of mean size in a group of 12 high-functioning individuals diagnosed with ASD using simplified versions of two identification and adaptation tasks that elicited characteristic perceptual averaging effects in a control group of neurotypical participants. In Experiment 1, participants performed with above chance accuracy in recalling the mean size of a set of circles (mean task) despite poor accuracy in recalling individual circle sizes (member task). In Experiment 2, their judgments of single circle size were biased by mean size adaptation. Overall, these results suggest that individuals with ASD perceptually average information about sets of objects in the surrounding environment. Our results underscore the fundamental nature of perceptual averaging in vision, and further our understanding of how autistic individuals make sense of the external environment. © 2016 Corbett, Venuti and Melcher.Item Open Access The whole warps the sum of its parts: gestalt-defined-group mean size biases memory for individual objects(SAGE Publications Inc., 2017) Corbett, Jennifer E.The efficiency of averaging properties of sets without encoding redundant details is analogous to gestalt proposals that perception is parsimoniously organized as a function of recurrent order in the world. This similarity suggests that grouping and averaging are part of a broader set of strategies allowing the visual system to circumvent capacity limitations. To examine how gestalt grouping affects the manner in which information is averaged and remembered, I compared the error in observers’ adjustments of remembered sizes of individual circles in two different mean-size sets defined by similarity, proximity, connectedness, or a common region. Overall, errors were more similar within the same gestalt-defined groups than between different gestalt-defined groups, such that the remembered sizes of individual circles were biased toward the mean size of their respective gestalt-defined groups. These results imply that gestalt grouping facilitates perceptual averaging to minimize the error with which individual items are encoded, thereby optimizing the efficiency of visual short-term memory. © 2016, © The Author(s) 2016.