Seeing the forest and the trees: Cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying recognition of individual objects and sets

当面对一组相似的物体时，例如一群面孔或一群迎面而来的汽车，人类观察者可以快速且似乎自动地提取这些物体的汇总统计数据（例如，平均表情或位置）。这项研究将提供对人类视觉系统如何执行这种大规模计算壮举的见解。这代表了理解视觉的重要一步，并最终将我们的知识应用于人工视觉系统的开发和视觉障碍的康复。该研究还将调查注意力负荷对环境汇总统计感知的影响，这对于在繁忙的交通中驾驶等任务至关重要。

When confronted with a set of similar objects, such as a crowd of faces or a flow of oncoming cars, human observers can rapidly and seemingly automatically extract summary statistics of these sets of objects (e.g., mean expression or location). This research will provide insights into how the human visual system executes this massive feat of computation. This represents a vital step in understanding vision in general and in eventually applying our knowledge to the development of artificial vision systems and to rehabilitation of visual disorders. The research will also investigate the effects of attentional load on perception of summary statistics of the environment, which is critical for tasks such as driving in busy traffic.