Ensemble Perception, Summary Statistics, and Perceptual Awareness: A Response.

The extent to which perception is rich or sparse is a foundational issue in consciousness studies. According to those who claim that perception is rich, observers are aware of more information than they can attend to or remember [1]. Meanwhile, those who believe perception is sparse directly link awareness to the finite capacities of attention and working memory [2–4]. However, this view is often criticized since these limited mechanisms are thought to be unable to account for the impression of a rich, detailed perceptual experience that most observers have [5]. In our recent article [6], we argued that this criticism is misguided and that these supposedly limited cognitive mechanisms can support a much richer perceptual experience than is often claimed. By representing information as visual ensembles and summary statistics [7], observers are able to perceive far more than just a few items at a given time. Summary statistics give observers access to some information about the entire scene in the form of an ensemble percept. We claimed that ensembles and summary statistics explain the intuitive sense of a rich perceptual experience without having to rely on a new type of conscious experience, namely phenomenal consciousness [1]. Put more simply, the sparse view is not so sparse after all.