Ensemble coding and two conceptions of perceptual sparsity

In their paper “What is the Bandwidth of Perceptual Experience” Cohen et al. contribute to a growing literature [1] on the implications of ensemble coding (also known as summary statistics) for accounts of the bandwidth of perception [2,3]. According to the sparse view, the bandwidth of perception is very narrow, and subjects have conscious access only to the handful of objects that get through the bottleneck of attention and/or working memory. Cohen et al. argue that ensemble coding research undermines the sparse view