Linear Summation of Repulsive and Attractive Serial Dependencies: Orientation and Motion Dependencies Sum in Motion Perception

Abstract

Recent work from several groups has shown that perception of various visual attributes in human observers at a given moment is biased toward what was recently seen. This positive serial dependency is a kind of temporal averaging that exploits short-term correlations in visual scenes to reduce noise and stabilize perception. To date, this stabilizing "continuity field" has been demonstrated on stable visual attributes such as orientation and face identity, yet it would be counterproductive to apply it to dynamic attributes in which change sensitivity is needed. Here, we tested this using motion direction discrimination and predict a negative perceptual dependency: a contrastive relationship that enhances sensitivity to change. Surprisingly, our data showed a cubic-like pattern of dependencies with positive and negative components. By interleaving various stimulus combinations, we separated the components and isolated a positive perceptual dependency for motion and a negative dependency for orientation. A weighted linear sum of the separate dependencies described the original cubic pattern well. The positive dependency for motion shows an integrative perceptual effect and was unexpected, although it is consistent with work on motion priming. These findings suggest that a perception-stabilizing continuity field occurs pervasively, occurring even when it obscures sensitivity to dynamic stimuli.

Confidence boosts serial dependence in orientation estimation

“…All subjects reported normal or corrected visual acuity, provided written informed consent, and were compensated monetarily. Sample size was chosen to be on par with recent serial dependence experiments which focus on group-level statistical inferences (Alais et al, 2017;Bliss et al, 2017;Fritsche et al, 2017), while also being large enough to detect the PEB, as per our prior work (Samaha et al, 2016). Data from this experiment were published previously as part of a multi-experiment study addressing different hypotheses .…”

“…Serial dependence often manifests as a bias towards reporting that a current stimulus appears more similar to recently seen stimuli than it actually is. Serial dependence occurs for a range of stimulus features, including luminance (Fründ et al, 2014), orientation Fritsche et al, 2017), spatial location , direction of motion (Alais et al, 2017), numerosity (Fornaciai and Park, 2018), motion variance (Suárez-Pinilla et al, 2018), and higher-level features such as face identity (Liberman et al, 2014). Although suboptimal in a psychophysical task where stimuli are temporally uncorrelated, in many real-world scenarios stimuli are stable across various time scales and serial dependence may be an adaptive bias that promotes temporal continuity (Kiyonaga et al, 2017).…”

“…x-axis), whereas a repulsive bias would result in response errors of an opposite sign, and no serial dependence would result in a flat line. This profile has been previously parameterized by fitting the data with a derivative-of-Gaussian function(DoG;Fischer and Whitney, 2014;Liberman et al, 2014;Alais et al, 2017;Bliss et al, 2017;Fritsche et al, 2017) of the form: = 6(89) ;…”

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

“…Beyond orientation Fritsche et al, 2017;Liberman, Zhang, & Whitney, 2016;Manassi et al, 2017) and other basic features (motion: Alais, Leung, & Van der Burg, 2017;position: Manassi et al, 2018), serial dependence occurs at higher levels of perception as well. We have recently demonstrated that the continuity field is objectselective by showing that the perception of face identity is systematically biased towards identities seen up to several seconds prior, even across changes in viewpoint (Liberman et al, 2014; see also Taubert, Alais, & Burr, 2016;Taubert, Van der Burg, & Alais, 2016;Xia et al, 2016).…”

Auditory perceptual history is communicated through alpha oscillations

“…Anstis, 1982) to gender of human voices (Schweinberger et al, 2008) and even vocal affect 13 (Bestelmeyer et al, 2010). While the classical paradigm usually involves long periods of 14 adaptation, sizeable negative aftereffects can arise after very brief presentations in vision as 15 in audition (Aagten-Murphy and Burr, 2016; Alais et al, 2017Alais et al, , 2015. 16…”