Variability leads to overestimation of mean summaries

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-1-2021

Abstract

Research on ensemble perception has shown that people can extract both mean and variance information, but much less is understand how these two different types of summaries interact with one another. Some research has argued that people are more erroneous in extracting the mean of displays that have greater variability. In all three experiments, we manipulated the variability in the displays. Participants reported the mean size of a set of circles (Experiment 1) and mean length of horizontally placed (Experiment 2a) and randomly oriented lines (Experiment 2b). In all experiments, we found that mean size estimations were more erroneous for higher than smaller variance displays. More critically, there was a tendency to overestimate the mean, driven by variance in both task-relevant and task-irrelevant features. We discuss these findings in relation to limitations in concurrent summarization ability and outlier discounting in ensemble perception.

Identifier

85103355621 (Scopus)

Publication Title

Attention Perception and Psychophysics

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-021-02269-2

e-ISSN

1943393X

ISSN

19433921

PubMed ID

33772448

First Page

1129

Last Page

1140

Issue

3

Volume

83

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