Fleeting Impressions of Economic Value via Summary Statistical Representations

Visual processing is limited: we cannot exhaustively analyze every object in a scene in a brief glance. However, ensemble perception affords the visual system a rapid shortcut to efficiently evaluate multiple objects. Ensemble processing has been widely tested across basic features. However, ensemble perception could be especially important and valuable for processes that are normally thought to require cognitive deliberative effort. One typical high-level cognitive process that humans engage in frequently is evaluating the value of objects. Here, we presented brief displays of consumer products to human observers and measured their visual sensitivity to the average value of the sets. We found that participants were sensitive to the average value of sets of products even when they did not have explicit memory for every item in the display. Our results show that value judgments can be based on ensemble information. Although value is thought to be an inferential concept, ensemble processing affords the brain a heuristic to efficiently assign value to entire sets of objects.