The Promotion Of Variation Consistency Of Audiovisual Stimuli On Ensemble Coding

Forming a rapid perception of a set of similar objects is a crucial skill in daily life.Humans can efficiently and accurately extract the summary statistics of a set of similar objects from it through ensemble coding.Previous studies on dual-modal ensemble encoding have found that when one statistically summarizes the whole sequence of randomly presented stimuli in the audiovisual modal simultaneously,the average pitch perception of the auditory modal does not change significantly,whereas the average size perception of the visual channel is affected.And the results of a large number of studies have shown that people’s perception,comprehension,and memory of stimuli are significantly improved when audiovisual stimuli possess consistency.Therefore,the question of this study is whether subjects can use this rule to enhance the processing of visual stimuli when the audiovisual stimuli have variation consistency,thus,the accuracy of visual ensemble coding in dual-modal ensemble coding is improved.In our study,we explore the variation consistency of audiovisual stimuli in two dimensions: the range(variation consistency at the same interval)and the trend(stimuli change in the same direction).In Experiment 1,we explored whether both dimensions need to be consistent at the same time to contribute to the accuracy of visual ensemble coding in dual-modal ensemble coding,or whether only range consistency is required to contribute.It was found that the accuracy of visual ensemble coding in dual-modal ensemble coding could be improved only when the range and the trend were consistent at the same time.In contrast,when the range was consistent and the trend was not consistent,the accuracy of visual ensemble coding in dual-modal ensemble coding was not improved.These results suggest that the simultaneous consistency of the trend and the range are the keys to facilitating the accuracy of visual ensemble coding in dual-modal ensemble coding.However,there is another possibility that the trend consistency alone is required to facilitate the effect.In Experiment 2,we tested this possibility by manipulating that trend was consistent but the range was not.The results show that the accuracy of visual ensemble coding in dual-modal ensemble coding can be improved when the trend is consistent,even if the range is not.Combining the results of Experiments 1 and 2 suggests that trend consistency is a key dimension that can contribute to the accuracy of visual ensemble coding in dual-modal ensemble coding alone.In Experiments 1 and 2,we found that trend consistency can facilitate dual-modal ensemble coding;however,the cognitive mechanism of this facilitation is not clear to us.From the perspective of audiovisual integration,when the audiovisual stimuli changed in a consistent trend,subjects were able to better perceive the stimuli of the two channels as one and were able to use this consistency to enhance the perceptual processing of visual stimuli,saving subjects’ cognitive resources and thus improving their ensemble encoding.To test this hypothesis,in Experiment 3 we manipulated the consistency of audiovisual stimulus changes by presenting audiovisual stimulus sequences in both trend-consistent and trend-inconsistent conditions,and then presenting subjects with a single audiovisual stimulus combination and asking them to recall whether this combination had appeared in the earlier sequence.It was found that subjects were significantly more correct in the trend-consistent condition than in the trend-inconsistent condition,suggesting that trend consistency does better help subjects perceive audiovisual stimuli as a whole.In summary,this study explored the impacts of variation consistency of audiovisual stimuli on ensemble coding by manipulating the different consistency relationships between audiovisual stimuli,and the findings can be summarized as follows:(1)The accuracy of visual ensemble coding in dual-modal ensemble coding can be improved when the audiovisual stimuli only have change trend consistency.(2)The reason why the accuracy of visual ensemble coding in dual-modal ensemble coding was improved when the audiovisual stimuli were consistent with the change in trend may be because the consistency of the change in the trend of the audiovisual stimuli promoted the integration of the audiovisual and thus improved the accuracy of ensemble encoding.