Abstract
Humans have the ability to rapidly extract summary statistics from object groupings through a specific capability known as ensemble coding. Previous literature has reported that this ability can become biased by prior perceptual experiences at the individual level. However, it remains unknown whether interpersonal prior information could also bias ensemble perception through a co-representation process. Experiment 1 found that participants’ summary estimations were biased toward their co-actor’s stimuli. Experiment 2 confirmed a causal relationship between the bias effect and the co-representation process by showing a reduction in biased estimation after pairing participants with an out-group partner. These findings extend the sources of prior information exploited by humans during perceptual average from individual-level information (i.e., self-tasks) to interpersonal-level information (i.e., co-actor’s tasks). More specifically, interpersonal prior information is shown to act in a top-down and implicit manner, biasing ensemble perception.
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Data availability
The data and experimental paradigms from all experiments are available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/7n2qp/). None of the experiments described was preregistered.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a grant from the Social Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province, PR China (21YJRC09ZD) and Open Research Fund of College of Teacher Education, Zhejiang Normal University (No. jykf21026).
This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the Ethics Committee of Zhejiang Normal University.
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J. Wang conceptualized the research project. Z. Zheng and J. Wang designed the experiment, analyzed the data and wrote the paper; Z. Zheng conducted the experiment. All authors approved the final revision of the manuscript for submission.
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Zheng, Z., Wang, J. Interpersonal prior information informs ensemble coding through the co-representation process. Psychon Bull Rev 31, 886–896 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02390-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02390-3