ArticleAttention, perception & psychophysics2021
Variability leads to overestimation of mean summaries.
Article in Attention, perception & psychophysics, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Effects of emotional variability on social evaluations of faces: An advantage of low variability.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Continuous affect tracking reveals that overestimation during the recollection of affect is idiosyncratic and stable.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Overestimation of variability in ensembles of color value and size.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Learning of the mean, but not variance, of color distributions cues target location probability.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Pupil responds spontaneously to visuospatial regularity.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Ensemble Coding of Crowd with Cross-Category Facial Expressions.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Article
- Perceptual history biases in serial ensemble representation.Journal of vision · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
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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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.