Serial dependence in position occurs at the time of perception

Abstract

Observers perceive objects in the world as stable over space and time, even though the visual experience of those objects is often discontinuous and distorted due to masking, occlusion, camouflage, or noise. How are we able to easily and quickly achieve stable perception in spite of this constantly changing visual input? It was previously shown that observers experience serial dependence in the perception of features and objects, an effect that extends up to 15 seconds back in time. Here, we asked whether the visual system utilizes an object's prior physical location to inform future position assignments in order to maximize location stability of an object over time. To test this, we presented subjects with small targets at random angular locations relative to central fixation in the peripheral visual field. Subjects reported the perceived location of the target on each trial by adjusting a cursor's position to match its location. Subjects made consistent errors when reporting the perceived position of the target on the current trial, mislocalizing it toward the position of the target in the preceding two trials (Experiment 1). This pull in position perception occurred even when a response was not required on the previous trial (Experiment 2). In addition, we show that serial dependence in perceived position occurs immediately after stimulus presentation, and it is a fast stabilization mechanism that does not require a delay (Experiment 3). This indicates that serial dependence occurs for position representations and facilitates the stable perception of objects in space. Taken together with previous work, our results show that serial dependence occurs at many stages of visual processing, from initial position assignment to object categorization.

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

“…We previously observed a similarly strong serial dependence on items that are retro-cued but not reported (omission of the response phase in a subset of trials) as on reported targets 15 (see also refs. 3,7 ). This makes it unlikely that the report itself is responsible for the enhanced serial dependence on targets.…”

“…This bias was enhanced by spatial and temporal item proximity as well as by attentional selection and was termed 'serial dependence'. It has since been observed for other modalities, including facial identity and expression 4,5 , spatial positions 6,7 , numerosity [8][9][10] or ensemble representations 11 . As serial dependence reduces differences in the appearance of similar consecutive objects, it has been interpreted as promoting perceptual stability and continuity of a visual object over time 3 .…”

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).…”

The role of feature-based attention in visual serial dependence

“…In line with this idea, recent studies have found that perceptual decisions about a large variety of visual stimulus features are biased towards features encountered in the recent past. Such features include orientation (Cicchini & Burr, 2017;Czoschke, Fischer, Beitner, Kaiser, & Bledowski, 2018;Fritsche et al, 2017), numerosity (Cicchini, Anobile, & Burr, 2014;Corbett, Fischer, & Whitney, 2011;Fornaciai & Park, 2018a), spatial location (Bliss, Sun, & D'Esposito, 2017;Manassi, Liberman, Kosovicheva, Zhang, & Whitney, 2018;Papadimitriou, White, & Snyder, 2016), visual variance (Suárez-Pinilla, Seth, & Roseboom, 2018), face identity (Liberman, Fischer, & Whitney, 2014), emotional expression and attractiveness (Xia, Leib, & Whitney, 2016). While it is still debated whether such serial dependence biases are introduced at a perceptual stage or at a post-perceptual, decision or short-term memory stage (Fritsche et al, 2017;Bliss et al, 2017;Cicchini & Burr, 2017;Fornaciai & Park, 2018a), the ubiquity of serial dependencies in perceptual decisions is striking and suggests that serial dependencies might arise from a general computation of the brain, potentially reflecting the stabilization of neural representations.…”