City Research Online

Abstract

1. Whereas psychophysicists may formulate hypotheses about appearance, they can only measure performance. Bias and imprecision in psychophysical data need not necessarily reflect bias and imprecision in perception.

2. Sensory systems may exaggerate the differences between each item and its neighbors in an ensemble. Alternatively, sensory systems may homogenize the ensemble; thereby removing any apparent differences between neighboring items.

3. Ensemble perception may be involuntary when observers attempt to report the identities of individual items. Conversely, when asked to make a (voluntary) decision about the ensemble as a whole, observers may find it very difficult to compute statistics that are based on more than a very small number of individual items.

4. Modeling decisions about prothetic continua like size and contrast can be tricky, because sensory signals may be distorted before and/or after voluntarily computing ensemble statistics. With metathetic continua, like spatial orientation, distortion is less problematic; physically vertical things necessarily appear close to vertical and physically horizontal things necessarily appear close to horizontal.

5. Decision processes are corrupted by noise that, like distortion, may be added to sensory signals prior to and/or after voluntarily computing ensemble statistics.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Departments:	School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Optometry & Visual Sciences
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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