Роль статистических свойств распределений зрительных признаков в восприятии и категоризации множественных объектовDistributional statistics of visual features in ensemble perception and categorization

Recent studies showed that the visual system represents the whole distribution of objects’ features presented in a scene. Present work develops this idea and explores the ways how this rich representation can be used. First, we showed that the visual system can extract different ensemble summary statistics for a group of objects (the mean value, range, and numerosity) in parallel (without mutual interference) and using independent cognitive mechanisms. Secondly, the shape of feature distributions is used as an important cue for rapid visual categorization and segmentation of multiple objects defined by a conjunction of two features. Finally, we showed that the visual system strongly relies on the feature distribution representation during several types of visual search.