Laws of concatenated perception: Vision goes for novelty, Decisions for perseverance

Abstract

Every instant of perception depends on a cascade of brain processes calibrated to the history of sensory and decisional events. In the present work, we show that human visual perception is constantly shaped by two contrasting forces, exerted by sensory adaptation and past decisions. In a series of experiments, we used multilevel modelling and cross-validation approaches to investigate the impact of previous stimuli and responses on current errors in adjustment tasks. Our results revealed that each perceptual report is permeated by opposite biases from a hierarchy of serially dependent processes: low-level adaptation repels perception away from previous stimuli; high-level, decisional traces attract perceptual reports toward previous responses. Contrary to recent claims, we demonstrated that positive serial dependence does not result from continuity fields operating at the level of early visual processing, but arises from the inertia of decisional templates. This finding is consistent with a Two-process model of serial dependence in which the persistence of read-out weights in a decision unit compensates for sensory adaptation, leading to attractive biases in sequential responses. We propose the first unified account of serial dependence in which functionally distinct mechanisms, operating at different stages, promote the differentiation and integration of visual information over time.not peer-reviewed)

Decay of internal reference information in duration discrimination: Intertrial interval modulates the Type B effect

“…Within this line of research, it has been suggested that sequential effects may emerge in different stages of processing, ranging from early sensory to decisional stages of processing (e.g., Fornaciai & Park, 2018; Fritsche, Mostert, & de Lange, 2017; Frund, Wichmann, & Macke, 2014; St John-Saaltink et al, 2016). Some researchers argue that stimulus history might evoke contrastive effects emerging in early perceptual stages (e.g., repulsive after-effects), whereas assimilatory biases are caused by response history (Fritsche et al, 2017; Pascucci, Mancuso, Santandrea, Libera, & Plomp, 2017), whereas other studies also provide evidence for perception-based assimilatory effects (Fornaciai & Park, 2018; St John-Saaltink et al, 2016).…”

Serial dependence promotes the stability of perceived emotional expression depending on face similarity

“…Although there is a great deal of debate surrounding the origin of sequential dependencies in perception Cicchini et al, 2017;Fritsche et al, 2017;Kiyonaga et al, 2017;Liberman et al, 2014;Pascucci et al, 2017;Suárez-Pinilla, Anil, & Roseboom, 2018), serial dependence may very likely happen at every level of visual and cognitive processing (perception, attention, decision, memory, and motor systems), and future research should investigate the interaction (and degree of independence) between all these components. Whereas our data cannot clearly disentangle between these different components, they provide further insights regarding the types of information and selectivity that serial dependence can exhibit.…”

The Push-pull of Serial Dependence Effects: Attraction to the Prior Response and Repulsion from the Prior Stimulus

“…To preview our results, our findings are consistent with two effects that predate Fischer and Whitney (2014): an attractive response effect (Annis & Malmberg, 2013;Jesteadt et al, 1977;Wagenmakers et al, 2004) combined with a repulsive stimulus effect (Gibson & Radner, 1937;Webster, 2015) . On this account, every response reflects both effects, to varying degrees, and this mixture has complicated the theoretical interpretation of the serial dependence effect (see also Fornaciai & Park, 2019;Fritsche et al, 2017;Manassi et al, 2018;Pascucci et al, 2019b).…”

“…While it has previously been acknowledged that multiple dependencies may influence behavior simultaneously (e.g., Fornaciai & Park, 2019;Fritsche et al, 2017;Manassi et al, 2018;Pascucci et al, 2019b;Schwiedrzik et al, 2014), an important implication of this for serial dependence has not yet been highlighted: if there are two opposing dependencies, then average results plotted as a function of the difference between inducer and target will not properly reveal the magnitude of either dependency. Behavior on each trial might reflect a yin-yang summation of these complementary dependencies, with average performance SERIAL DEPENDENCE 7 across trials reflecting the relative balance between them.…”

“…identifying response effects separate from stimulus effects. Next, we applied these techniques to reanalyze four datasets across three published studies of serial dependence Pascucci et al, 2019b;Samaha et al, 2019). To preview the results, when allowing for the possibility of simultaneous response effects and stimulus effects, the existing data do not support an attraction to the previous stimuli.…”