David Whitney

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of Psychology

A paramount challenge for the brain is to precisely model the world and control behavior within the confines of limited encoding capacities. Efficient coding theory posits a unified framework for understanding how neural systems enhance encoding accuracy by tuning to environmental statistics. While this theory has been thoroughly explored within th...

It has been suggested that humans use summary statistics such as the average of the emotion of individual faces when they rapidly judge group emotion. Previous studies have mainly used faces of actors posing basic emotions, and morphed versions of these faces, against a plain background. In the present study, photographs taken in real-world setting...

Background and Hypothesis For a long time, it was proposed that schizophrenia (SCZ) patients rely more on sensory input and less on prior information, potentially leading to reduced serial dependence—ie, a reduced influence of prior stimuli in perceptual tasks. However, existing evidence is constrained to a few paradigms, and whether reduced serial...

When inferring others’ emotions, humans often use contextual information (e.g. other people, scene information, etc.) in addition to facial expressions. Previous research has found that observers can accurately infer and track others’ emotions by using only contextual information (Inferential Emotion Tracking). However, it’s unknown whether using c...

Positive serial dependencies are phenomena in which actions, perception, decisions, and memory of features or objects are systematically biased towards the recent past. Across several decades, serial dependencies have been variously referred to as priming, sequential dependencies, sequential effects or serial effects. Despite a great deal of resear...

Background The human brain can rapidly represent sets of similar stimuli by their ensemble summary statistics, like the average orientation or size. Classic models assume that ensemble statistics are computed by integrating all elements with equal weight. Challenging this view, here, we show that ensemble statistics are estimated by combining paraf...

Positive sequential dependencies are phenomena in which actions, perception, decisions, and memory of features or objects are systematically biased toward visual experiences from the recent past. Among many labels, serial dependencies have been referred to as priming, sequential dependencies, sequential effects, or serial effects. Despite extensive...

The human brain can rapidly represent sets of similar stimuli by their ensemble summary statistics, like the average orientation or size. Classic models assume that ensemble statistics are computed by integrating all elements with equal weight. Challenging this view, here we show that ensemble statistics are estimated by combining parafoveal and fo...

Perception of trustworthiness significantly impacts economic (Rezlescu et al., 2012) and juridical decisions (Blair et al., 2004). Consequently, the misperception of trustworthiness can lead to devastating outcomes. Contextual threats can bias observer perception of the trustworthiness of face stimuli (Mattavelli et al., 2021), but studies on trust...

Emotion perception is fundamental to human experience, and it reveals both the sophistication and richness of vision. Although emotion perception depends in part on face processing, it also hinges critically on background scene context (e.g., Chen & Whitney, 2019, 2020, 2021). However, how the visual system uses background scene context to modulate...

Humans often encounter multiple complex social cues when perceiving emotion, but how does the brain combine cues into a single judgment of emotion? Observers do not just use facial expressions, as previous studies have found that contextual information is just as important (Chen and Whitney, PNAS, 2019). One idea suggests that emotional cues are co...

Purpose: Human perception and decisions are biased toward previously seen stimuli. This phenomenon is known as serial dependence and has been extensively studied for the last decade. Recent evidence suggests that clinicians' judgments of mammograms might also be impacted by serial dependence. However, the stimuli used in previous psychophysical ex...

Emotion perception is essential for successful social interactions and maintaining long-term relationships with friends and family. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience social communication deficits and have reported difficulties in facial expression recognition. However, emotion recognition depends on more than just processin...

Serial Dependence is a ubiquitous visual phenomenon in which sequentially viewed images appear more similar than they actually are, thus facilitating an efficient and stable perceptual experience in human observers. Although serial dependence is adaptive and beneficial in the naturally autocorrelated visual world, a smoothing perceptual experience,...

A critical function of the human visual system is to track emotion accurately and continuously. However, visual information about emotion fluctuates over time. Ideally, the visual system should track these temporal fluctuations-these "natural emotion statistics" of the world-over time. This would balance the need to detect changes in emotion with t...

Introduction Radiologists routinely make life-altering decisions. Optimizing these decisions has been an important goal for many years and has prompted a great deal of research on the basic perceptual mechanisms that underlie radiologists’ decisions. Previous studies have found that there are substantial individual differences in radiologists’ diag...

Human face recognition is robust even under conditions of extreme lighting and in situations where there is high noise and uncertainty. Mooney faces are a canonical example of this: Mooney faces are two-tone shadow-defined images that are readily and holistically recognized despite lacking easily segmented face features. Face perception in such imp...

The visual clutter we constantly encounter in the world limits object recognition, a phenomenon known as visual crowding. A new study shows that ensemble perception counters this by condensing redundant information into summary statistical representations, which thus releases visual crowding’s effect on individual objects.

Identifying the neural correlates of visual serial dependence has lagged behind the behavioral understanding. A new study in PLOS Biology provides a model of interpreting the complex relationship between physiology and behavior in studies of serial dependence.

Humans quickly detect and gaze at faces in the world, which reflects their importance in cognition and may lead to tuning of face recognition toward the central visual field. Although sometimes reported, foveal selectivity in face processing is debated: brain imaging studies have found evidence for a central field bias specific to faces, but behavi...

Humans perceive objects and scenes consistently, even in situations where visual input is noisy and unstable. One of the mechanisms that underlies this perceptual stability is serial dependence, whereby the perception of objects or features at any given moment is pulled toward what was previously seen. Although recent findings from several studies...

Medical image data is critically important for a range of disciplines, including medical image perception research, clinician training programs, and computer vision algorithms, among many other applications. Authentic medical image data, unfortunately, is relatively scarce for many of these uses. Because of this, researchers often collect their own...

Despite a noisy and ever-changing visual world, our perceptual experience seems remarkably stable over time. How does our visual system achieve this apparent stability? Here, we introduce a previously unknown visual illusion that shows direct evidence for an online mechanism continuously smoothing our percepts over time. As a result, a continuously...

Medical image interpretation is central to detecting, diagnosing, and staging cancer and many other disorders. At a time when medical imaging is being transformed by digital technologies and artificial intelligence, understanding the basic perceptual and cognitive processes underlying medical image interpretation is vital for increasing diagnostici...

In radiological screening, clinicians scan myriads of radiographs with the intent of recognizing and differentiating lesions. Even though they are trained experts, radiologists’ human search engines are not perfect: average daily error rates are estimated around 3–5%. A main underlying assumption in radiological screening is that visual search on a...

In visual crowding, the perception of a target deteriorates in the presence of nearby flankers. Traditionally, target-flanker interactions have been considered as local, mostly deleterious, low-level, and feature specific, occurring when information is pooled along the visual processing hierarchy. Recently, a vast literature of high-level effects i...

In any given perceptual task, the visual system selectively weighs or filters incoming information. The particular set of weights or filters form a kind of template, which reveals the regions or types of information that are particularly useful for a given perceptual decision.¹,² Unfortunately, sensory input is noisy and ever changing. To compensat...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Understanding the emotional states of others is important for social functioning. Recent studies show that context plays an essential role in emotion recognition. However, it remains unclear whether emotion inference from visual scene context is as efficient as emotion recognition from faces. Here, we measured the speed of context-based emotion per...

Our senses provide us with a rich experience of a detailed visual world, yet the empirical results seem to suggest severe limitations on our ability to perceive and remember. In recent attempts to reconcile the contradiction between what is experienced and what can be reported, it has been argued that the visual world is condensed to a set of summa...

Radiologists and pathologists frequently make highly consequential perceptual decisions. For example, visually searching for a tumor and recognizing whether it is malignant can have a life-changing impact on a patient. Unfortunately, all human perceivers— even radiologists—have perceptual biases. Because human perceivers (medical doctors) will, for...

The ability to recognize others' emotions is critical for social interactions. It is widely assumed that recognizing facial expressions predominantly determines perceived categorical emotion, and contextual information only coarsely modulates or disambiguates interpreted faces. Using a novel method, inferential emotion tracking, we isolated and qua...

In a glance, observers can evaluate gist characteristics from crowds of faces, such as the average emotional tenor or the average family resemblance. Prior research suggests that high-level ensemble percepts rely on holistic and viewpoint-invariant information. However, it is also possible that feature-based analysis was sufficient to yield success...

Humans perceive faces holistically rather than as a set of separate features. Previous work demonstrates that some individuals are better at this holistic type of processing than others. Here, we show that there are unique individual differences in holistic processing of specific Mooney faces. We operationalized the increased difficulty of recogniz...

Perceiving the positions of objects is a prerequisite for most other visual and visuomotor functions, but human perception of object position varies from one individual to the next. The source of these individual differences in perceived position and their perceptual consequences are unknown. Here, we tested whether idiosyncratic biases in the unde...

Perceiving the positions of objects is a prerequisite for most other visual and visuomotor functions, but human perception of object position varies from one individual to the next. The source of these individual differences in perceived position and their perceptual consequences are unknown. Here, we tested whether idiosyncratic biases in the unde...

Visual crowding-the deleterious influence of nearby objects on object recognition-is considered to be a major bottleneck for object recognition in cluttered environments. Although crowding has been studied for decades with static and artificial stimuli, it is still unclear how crowding operates when viewing natural dynamic scenes in real-life situa...

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 val...

Humans have remarkable abilities to construct a stable visual world from continuously changing input. There is increasing evidence that momentary visual input blends with previous input to preserve perceptual continuity. Most studies have shown that such influences can be traced to characteristics of the attended object at a given moment. Little is...

Visual ensembles, like leaves on a tree, often share properties such as shape or color. Thisredundancy can be quantified as a feature probability distribution whose summary statistics (e.g.,mean) observers can report explicitly. Here, we show that such explicit reports underestimate therichness of ensemble perception. Participants (N=12 per conditi...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Automated Driving Systems (ADSs) are developing at a rapid pace and even testing on public roads, but pedestrians’ interaction with ADSs is poorly understood. The objective of this study is to investigate the effective interaction between ADSs and pedestrians. We developed prototype interfaces using different modalities (e.g., text vs. symbol). The...

In everyday life, we continuously search for and classify objects in the environment around us. This kind of visual search is extremely important when performed by radiologists in cancer image interpretation and officers in airport security screening. During these tasks, observers often examine large numbers of uncorrelated images (tumor x-rays, ch...

Humans have remarkable abilities to construct a stable visual world from continuously changing input. There is increasing evidence that momentary visual input blends with previous input to preserve perceptual continuity. Most studies have shown that such influences can be traced to characteristics of the attended object at a given moment. Little is...

Humans have remarkable abilities to construct a stable visual world from continuously changing input. There is increasing evidence that momentary visual input blends with previous input to preserve perceptual continuity. Most studies have shown that such influences can be traced to characteristics of the attended object at a given moment. Little is...