Suppressing Distractors, Enhancing Targets: Template Tuning in Ensemble Perception

The files Study1_Exp1_AllRawData.csv and Study1_Exp2_AllRawData.csv contain data accompanying the paper "Suppressing Distractors, Enhancing Targets: Template Tuning in Ensemble Perception" by Gizem Tanseli Kaspar and Sabrina Hansmann-Roth. Short description from the paper: "Ensemble perception is a fundamental mechanism enabling the visual system to rapidly extract summary statistical properties (e.g., mean orientation) from a large number of objects. This study investigated the influence of attentional templates for targets and distractors, which are formed during visual search, on subsequent ensemble perception. Participants first completed a visual search task involving target and distractor colors, followed by an ensemble orientation estimation task in which these colors recurred in various combinations. The first experiment revealed that the target template systematically biased ensemble estimates, with the strongest effect occurring when both templates recurred together. Furthermore, when both colors from the search task were repeated, the bias exceeded the sum of the individual effects of target and distractor conditions, which demonstrates that the combined effect of target enhancement and distractor suppression may be greater than predicted by their individual effects. In the second experiment, presentation duration (150 ms vs. 500 ms) was manipulated. While our results showed that duration did not alter the magnitude of the biases, a longer presentation time improved response precision. These findings suggest that ensemble perception can be modulated by recently formed attentional templates and systematically shape the formation of summary statistical representations." You can use them or modify the data as you wish as long as you cite the original preprint (see LICENSE.txt): Kaspar, G. T. & Hansmann-Roth, S. (2026). Suppressing Distractors, Enhancing Targets: Template Tuning in Ensemble Perception (PsyArXiv), Additionally, please cite the data: Kaspar, G. T. & Hansmann-Roth, S. (2026). Datasets: Suppressing Distractors, Enhancing Targets: Template Tuning in Ensemble Perception Description of the variables is provided in variables.txt. If you have the questions feel free to contact me at [e-mail] Gizem Tanseli Kaspar