Attractive Serial Dependence in the Absence of an Explicit Task

Abstract

Attractive serial dependence refers to an adaptive change in the representation of sensory information, whereby a current stimulus appears to be similar to a previous one. The nature of this phenomenon is controversial, however, as serial dependence could arise from biased perceptual representations or from biased traces of working memory representation at a decisional stage. Here, we demonstrated a neural signature of serial dependence in numerosity perception emerging early in the visual processing stream even in the absence of an explicit task. Furthermore, a psychophysical experiment revealed that numerosity perception is biased by a previously presented stimulus in an attractive way, not by repulsive adaptation. These results suggest that serial dependence is a perceptual phenomenon starting from early levels of visual processing and occurring independently from a decision process, which is consistent with the view that these biases smooth out noise from neural signals to establish perceptual continuity.

Probabilistic representation in human visual cortex reflects uncertainty in serial decisions

“…Our findings are compatible with recent decisional accounts of serial dependence (e.g. Bliss et al (2017); Fritsche et al (2017), but see Cicchini et al (2017); Fornaciai and Park (2018)) that propose that not perception itself, but rather later decisional stages bias behavior towards previously seen stimuli. Specifically, the ideal observer framework proposed here capitalizes on the stability of the visual world to make the best possible decisions, integrating sensory observations across time while weighting each piece of evidence by its uncertainty.…”

Context information supports serial dependence of multiple visual objects across memory episodes

“…Until now, the processing stage at which serial dependence occurs has remained unclear. While some studies have suggested a perceptual stage 3,11,22,31,32 , others have provided evidence for a memory-or decision-related process 6,20,33,34 . These seemingly contradictory results can be reconciled by assuming that serial dependence operates on multiple stages during object processing, as recently proposed 7 .…”

A Bayesian and efficient observer model explains concurrent attractive and repulsive history biases in visual perception

“…In contrast to repulsive adaptation, recent studies have found that perceptual decisions about stimulus features can be attracted towards stimuli encountered in the recent past -a phenomenon termed attractive serial dependence . Like repulsive adaptation, attractive serial dependence has now been reported for a large variety of visual features, such as orientation (Cicchini et al, 2017;Czoschke et al, 2019;Fritsche et al, 2017), numerosity (Cicchini et al, 2014;Corbett et al, 2011;Fornaciai and Park, 2018) and spatial location (Bliss et al, 2017;Manassi et al, 2018;Papadimitriou et al, 2016). This phenomenon may represent a (Bayes-)optimal strategy of decoding the sensory information into a perceptual decision (Cicchini et al, 2018;van Bergen and Jehee, 2019).…”