LAUSR

Ensemble perception is, essentially, the perception of groups of things. It has been referred to by various names over the years, including set perception, summary statistical perception, and sometimes even texture perception, among other terms. Ensemble perception is ubiquitous. The norm in natural scenes is to encounter groups or crowds of things, features, textures, or objects. Ensemble perception is therefore relevant throughout perception science. It has been reported in many arenas, not just within vision but across modalities. In particular, there has been rapid growth in the subfield of ensemble visual perception in the last few years. This special issue of AP&P reflects that growth, focusing on vision in particular. At the August, 2019 European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), Solomon and Hochstein organized a symposium on “Ensemble Perception: Theory and Experiment.” Talks included: Five Dichotomies in the Psychophysics of Ensemble Perception (Joshua A. Solomon), Ensemble Perception and the Inference of the Invisible (David Whitney, Zhimin Chen, and Allie Yamanashi), Perceptual Averaging: How to Separate Inattention From Representational Noise? (Aire Raidvee and Jüri Allik), The Properties of Large Receptive Fields Can Explain Ensemble-Related Phenomena (Igor S. Utochkin), and The How and Why of Ensemble Perception (Shaul Hochstein). (See abstracts at Perception, 48(2S), 1–236, 2019). Following the symposiumwe approached the editors of Attention, Perception & Psychophysics to edit a special issue on Ensemble Processing.