There is a growing body of research on ensemble perception, or our ability to form ensemble representations based on perceptual features for stimuli of varying levels of complexity, and more recently, on ensemble cognition, which refers to our ability to perceive higher-level properties of stimuli such as facial attractiveness or gaze direction. Less is known about our ability to form ensemble representations based on more abstract properties such as the semantic meaning associated with items in a scene. Previous work examining whether the meaning associated with digits can be incorporated into summary statistical representations suggests that numerical information from digit ensembles can be extracted rapidly, and likely using a parallel processing mechanism. Here, we further investigate whether participants can accurately generate summary representations of numerical value from digit sets and explore the effect of set size on their ability to do so, by comparing psychometric functions based on a numerical averaging task in which set size varied. Steeper slopes for ten- and seven-item compared to five-item digit sets provide evidence that displays with more digits yield more reliable discrimination between larger and smaller numerical averages. Additionally, consistent with previous reports, we observed a response bias such that participants were more likely to report that the numerical average was “greater than 5” for larger compared to smaller sets. Overall, our results contribute to evidence that ensemble representations for semantic attributes may be carried out via similar mechanisms as those reported for perceptual features.

关于整体感知的研究越来越多，或者说我们基于感知特征为各种复杂程度的刺激而形成整体表示的能力，以及最近对整体认知的研究，这是指我们感知更高层次特性的能力。诸如面部吸引力或注视方向的刺激。对于基于更抽象的属性（例如，与场景中的项目相关联的语义含义）形成集合表示的能力的了解还很少。先前的工作检查了是否可以将与数字相关的含义合并到摘要统计表示中，这表明可以快速提取数字合奏的数字信息，并且有可能使用并行处理机制。这里，我们通过比较基于数值大小任务的心理平均函数来比较参与者的大小是否变化，从而进一步研究参与者是否可以从数字集中准确地生成数值的摘要表示，并探讨集合大小对其能力的影响。十项和七项相对于五项数字集的更陡峭的斜率提供了证据，表明具有更多数字的显示在更大或更小的数字平均值之间进行更可靠的区分。此外，与以前的报告一致，我们观察到了一个响应偏差，因此与较小的组相比，参与者更有可能报告数字平均值“大于5”。总体，