title: The Whole Warps the Sum of Its Parts.
abstract: The efficiency of averaging properties of sets without encoding redundant details is analogous to gestalt proposals that perception is parsimoniously organized as a function of recurrent order in the world. This similarity suggests that grouping and averaging are part of a broader set of strategies allowing the visual system to circumvent capacity limitations. To examine how gestalt grouping affects the manner in which information is averaged and remembered, I compared the error in observers' adjustments of remembered sizes of individual circles in two different mean-size sets defined by similarity, proximity, connectedness, or a common region. Overall, errors were more similar within the same gestalt-defined groups than between different gestalt-defined groups, such that the remembered sizes of individual circles were biased toward the mean size of their respective gestalt-defined groups. These results imply that gestalt grouping facilitates perceptual averaging to minimize the error with which individual items are encoded, thereby optimizing the efficiency of visual short-term memory.
authors.affiliation: Aysel Sabuncu Brain Research Center, Bilkent University.
authors.forename: Jennifer E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Corbett
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D015982:Bias; D005260:Female; D005863:Gestalt Theory; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology
keywords: gestalt grouping; open data; perceptual averaging; summary statistics; visual short-term memory