Cognitive mechanisms for Summary statistical representation

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26380983
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Experimental psychology
• Research Institution: Mejiro University (2015-2016); Ochanomizu University (2014)
• Principal Investigator: TOKITA Midori 目白大学, 保健医療学部, 教授 (40571112)
• Research Collaborator: ISHIGUCHI Akira ; YANG Yi
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: 要約統計量 / 理想的観察者 / 平均値推定 / 選択的注意 / 統計的効率分析

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Many studies have shown that observers can accurately perceive and evaluate the statistical summary of presented objects’ attribute values without attending to each object. However, it remains controversial how visual system integrates the attribute value of multiple items and computes the average value to make an appropriate judgment.
1) People can extract the average size of all items without relying on focused attention to individual items when attention is distributed across a set of similar items. 2) The precision differed among size distributions and that the size of average value was overestimated to the actual size in all conditions with naive observers.The result demonstrated that some of items could be weighted more than the other; possibly larger items might be weighed more than smaller items.Our findings suggest that the process of representing average value may not be explained by a single definitive mechanism; rather, mediated by a mixture of the multiple processes.

Free Research Field

実験心理学　認知科学