Number perception emerges from multiple stages of visual processing. Understanding how systematic biases in number perception occur within a hierarchy of increasingly complex feature representations helps uncover the multistage processing underlying our visual number sense. Recent work demonstrated that reducing coherence of low-level visual attributes, such as color and orientation, systematically reduces perceived number. Here, we ask when in the visual processing hierarchy coherence affects numerosity perception and specifically whether the coherence effect is exclusive to low-level visual features or instead whether it can be driven by contextual or semantic relationships. We tested adults in an ordinal numerical comparison task with contextual coherence mathematically manipulated using a statistical model of visual object co-occurrence. Across several experiments, we found that arrays with high contextual coherence were perceived as numerically larger than arrays with low contextual coherence. This contextual coherence effect was not attenuated even when we reduced objects to texforms (unrecognizable images that preserve midlevel visual features) or removed semantic content from the images through box scrambling and diffeomorphic warping. Together, these results suggest that visual coherence derived from natural statistics of object co-occurrence systematically alters perceived numerosity at low-level visual processing, even before later stages at which items can be explicitly categorized and identified. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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上下文连贯性增加了独立于语义内容的感知数量。


数字感知产生于视觉处理的多个阶段。了解数字感知中的系统偏差如何在日益复杂的特征表示层次中发生，有助于揭示我们视觉数字感背后的多阶段处理。最近的研究表明，降低低级视觉属性（例如颜色和方向）的一致性会系统地减少感知数量。在这里，我们询问视觉处理层次结构中的连贯性何时影响数字感知，特别是连贯性效应是否专属于低级视觉特征，或者是否可以由上下文或语义关系驱动。我们在序数数值比较任务中测试了成年人，使用视觉对象共现的统计模型对上下文连贯性进行数学操作。通过几次实验，我们发现上下文一致性高的数组在数值上比上下文一致性低的数组大。即使我们将对象简化为纹理形式（保留中级视觉特征的无法识别的图像）或通过框置乱和微分同胚扭曲从图像中删除语义内容，这种上下文连贯效应也没有减弱。总之，这些结果表明，源自对象共现自然统计的视觉连贯性系统地改变了低级视觉处理中感知的数量，甚至在项目可以被明确分类和识别的后期阶段之前也是如此。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。