The Role of Attention Control in Ensemble Perception in the Presence of Selection

Abstract

Ensemble perception is the ability to extract summary statistics (e.g., mean, variance) from the aggregations of similar objects (Whitney & Yamanashi Leib, 2018). One common task used in ensemble perception studies requires participants to select a subset of a set of items before calculating a summary statistic (e.g., average size of the red circles among blue circles). It has been assumed that adding a selection requirement to an ensemble task does not change the ability that it measures. However, a recent study (Martin et al., 2021) found that adding a selective component to a task known to measure working memory capacity can remarkably change what the task measures (either working memory capacity or attention control). Given multiple debates about the role of attention in ensemble perception, we address the assumption that the presence of selection does not alter what an ensemble perception task measures. Thus, we examined whether a type of ensemble perception task, specifically mean discrimination, measures the same ensemble perception ability regardless of the presence of selection with a latent variables approach. Our results showed that ensemble perception and attention control are correlated at the construct level and the two constructs contribute equally to predicting the performance of mean discrimination tasks. The results suggest that ensemble perception requires attention control, and that all mean discrimination tasks reflect both ensemble perception and attention control ability to the same degree.