To understand visual consciousness, we must understand how the brain represents ensembles of objects at many levels of perceptual analysis. Ensemble perception refers to the visual system's ability to extract summary statistical information from groups of similar objects—often in a brief glance. It defines foundational limits on cognition, memory, and behavior. In this review, we provide an operational definition of ensemble perception and demonstrate that ensemble perception spans across multiple levels of visual analysis, incorporating both low-level visual features and high-level social information. Further, we investigate the functional usefulness of ensemble perception and its efficiency, and we consider possible physiological and cognitive mechanisms that underlie an individual's ability to make accurate and rapid assessments of crowds of objects.

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