Emotional judgments of scenes are influenced by unintentional averaging.

BACKGROUND: The visual system uses ensemble perception to summarize visual input across a variety of domains. This heuristic operates at multiple levels of vision, compressing information as basic as oriented lines or as complex as emotional faces. Given its pervasiveness, the ensemble unsurprisingly can influence how an individual item is perceived, and vice versa. METHODS: In the current experiments, we tested whether the perceived emotional valence of a single scene could be influenced by surrounding, simultaneously presented scenes. Observers first rated the emotional valence of a series of individual scenes. They then saw ensembles of the original images, presented in sets of four, and were cued to rate, for a second time, one of four. RESULTS: Results confirmed that the perceived emotional valence of the cued image was pulled toward the mean emotion of the surrounding ensemble on the majority of trials, even though the ensemble was task-irrelevant. Control experiments and analyses confirmed that the pull was driven by high-level, ensemble information. CONCLUSION: We conclude that high-level ensemble information can influence how we perceive individual items in a crowd, even when working memory demands are low and the ensemble information is not directly task-relevant.

Precise Ensemble Face Representation Given Incomplete Visual Input.

Humans can recognize faces in the presence of environmental noise. Here, we explore whether ensemble perception of faces is similarly robust. Is summary statistical information available from crowds of faces that are visually incomplete? Observers viewed sets of faces varying in identity or expression and adjusted a test face to match the perceived average. In one condition, faces amodally completed behind horizontal bars. In another condition, identical facial information was presented, but in the foreground (i.e., face parts appeared on fragmented strips in front of a background). Baseline performance was determined by performance on sets of fully visible faces. The results revealed that the ensemble representation of amodally completing sets was significantly better than the fragmented sets and marginally worse than in the fully visible condition. These results suggest that some ensemble information is available given limited visual input and supports a growing body of work suggesting that ensembles may be represented in the absence of complete visual information.

Sensorimotor coupling in music and the psychology of the groove.

The urge to move in response to music, combined with the positive affect associated with the coupling of sensory and motor processes while engaging with music (referred to as sensorimotor coupling) in a seemingly effortless way, is commonly described as the feeling of being in the groove. Here, we systematically explore this compelling phenomenon in a population of young adults. We utilize multiple levels of analysis, comprising phenomenological, behavioral, and computational techniques. Specifically, we show (a) that the concept of the groove is widely appreciated and understood in terms of a pleasurable drive toward action, (b) that a broad range of musical excerpts can be appraised reliably for the degree of perceived groove, (c) that the degree of experienced groove is inversely related to experienced difficulty of bimanual sensorimotor coupling under tapping regimes with varying levels of expressive constraint, (d) that high-groove stimuli elicit spontaneous rhythmic movements, and (e) that quantifiable measures of the quality of sensorimotor coupling predict the degree of experienced groove. Our results complement traditional discourse regarding the groove, which has tended to take the psychological phenomenon for granted and has focused instead on the musical and especially the rhythmic qualities of particular genres of music that lead to the perception of groove. We conclude that groove can be treated as a psychological construct and model system that allows for experimental exploration of the relationship between sensorimotor coupling with music and emotion.