The Whole Warps the Sum of Its Parts

Abstract

The efficiency of averaging properties of sets without encoding redundant details is analogous to gestalt proposals that perception is parsimoniously organized as a function of recurrent order in the world. This similarity suggests that grouping and averaging are part of a broader set of strategies allowing the visual system to circumvent capacity limitations. To examine how gestalt grouping affects the manner in which information is averaged and remembered, I compared the error in observers’ adjustments of remembered sizes of individual circles in two different mean-size sets defined by similarity, proximity, connectedness, or a common region. Overall, errors were more similar within the same gestalt-defined groups than between different gestalt-defined groups, such that the remembered sizes of individual circles were biased toward the mean size of their respective gestalt-defined groups. These results imply that gestalt grouping facilitates perceptual averaging to minimize the error with which individual items are encoded, thereby optimizing the efficiency of visual short-term memory.