A Population Response Model of Ensemble Perception

Ensemble representations have been considered as one of the strategies that the visual system adopts to cope with its limited capacity. Thus, they include various statistical summaries such as mean, variance, and distributional properties and are formed over many stages of visual processing. The current study proposes a population coding model of ensemble perception to provide a theoretical and computational framework for these various facets of ensemble perception. The proposed model consists of a simple feature layer and a pooling layer. We assumed ensemble representations as population responses in the pooling layer and decoded various statistical properties from population responses. Our model successfully predicted averaging performance in orientation, size, color, and motion direction across different tasks. Furthermore, it predicted variance discrimination performance and the priming effects of feature distributions. Finally, it explained the well-known variance and set size effects and has a potential for explaining the adaptation and clustering effects.