Serial dependence revealed in history-dependent perceptual templates

Murai, Yuki; Whitney, David

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2021.05.006

Cited by 47 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…More generally, our BOLD data argue against an early sensory origin of serial dependence for orientation and instead suggest that serial dependence is driven by post-perceptual or mnemonic circuits (Pascucci et al, 2019; Barbosa et al, 2020). However, because we used a paradigm that required working memory, our results may not generalize to other situations in which serial dependence is observed even in the absence of a memory delay (Fischer and Whitney, 2014; Cicchini et al, 2017; Collins, 2020; Murai and Whitney, 2021). Thus, future work is needed to better understand the role of sensory representations in paradigms with low contrast stimuli, that do not require a memory delay period, and that utilize other features besides orientation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 75%

Sensory readout accounts for adaptation

Sheehan¹,

Jt²

2021

Preprint

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Sensory responses and behavior are strongly shaped by stimulus history. For instance, perceptual reports are sometimes biased towards previously viewed stimuli (serial dependence). Previous behavioral studies suggest that serial dependence is implemented via modulations in visual cortex, but neural evidence is lacking. We recorded fMRI responses while human participants performed a delayed orientation discrimination task. While behavioral reports were attracted to the previous stimulus, response patterns in sensory areas were repelled. We reconciled these opposing biases using a model where both sensory encoding and readout are shaped by stimulus history. Neural adaptation reduces redundancy at encoding and leads to the repulsive biases that we observed in visual cortex. Serial dependence is not implemented in visual cortex but rather by readout mechanisms that account for adaptation during encoding. The model suggests the visual system improves efficiency via adaptation while still optimizing behavioral readout based on the temporal structure of natural stimuli.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 75%

Sensory readout accounts for adaptation

Sheehan¹,

Jt²

2021

Preprint

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“… Cicchini, Benedetto, and Burr (2021) have recently proposed that the priors that presumably play a crucial role in serial dependence arise in higher level visual processing, propagating information down to earlier sensory processing levels. This interesting possibility invites speculation that the detailed characteristics of serial dependence may differ depending on particular circumstances—for example, whether the effects are positive or negative, large or small (for similar speculation, see Murai & Whitney, 2021 ). Also, their temporal profiles may differ depending on the network involved in analyzing particular aspects that serial dependence is seen for.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

You see what you look for: Targets and distractors in visual search can cause opposing serial dependencies

et al. 2021

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Visual perception is, at any given moment, strongly influenced by its temporal context—what stimuli have recently been perceived and in what surroundings. We have previously shown that to-be-ignored items produce a bias upon subsequent perceptual decisions that acts in parallel with other biases induced by attended items. However, our previous investigations were confined to biases upon the perceived orientation of a visual search target, and it is unclear whether these biases influence perceptual decisions in a more general sense. Here, we test whether the biases from visual search targets and distractors affect the perceived orientation of a neutral test line, one that is neither a target nor a distractor. To do so, we asked participants to search for an oddly oriented line among distractors and report its location for a few trials and next presented a test line irrelevant to the search task. Participants were asked to report the orientation of the test line. Our results indicate that in tasks involving visual search, targets induce a positive bias upon a neutral test line if their orientations are similar, whereas distractors produce an attractive bias for similar test lines and a repulsive bias if the orientations of the test line and the average orientation of the distractors are far apart in feature space. In sum, our results show that both attentional role and proximity in feature space between previous and current stimuli determine the direction of biases in perceptual decisions.

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“…The attractive bias toward the previous response does not necessarily imply that subjects merely reproduced their previous motor commands. Several studies have experimentally precluded the effect of motor replication and observed an attractive bias even when reproducing the previous motor command would not result in such attraction (Cicchini et al, 2017; Fischer & Whitney, 2014; Kowler, 1989; Kwon & Knill, 2013; Murai & Whitney, 2021). For example, when subjects were asked to make a flipped version of orientation response that is vertically symmetric to the stimulus orientation on every second trial, they still systematically biased their responses toward the previous stimulus, and not toward the previous motor response, suggesting that the bias was introduced during the perceptual process (Cicchini et al, 2017).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dissecting the effects of adaptive encoding and predictive inference on a single perceptual estimation

Moon

Kwon

2022

Preprint

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The human visual system exploits continuity in the visual environment, which induces two contrasting perceptual phenomena: repulsive aftereffects and attractive serial dependences. Recent studies have theorized that these two effects concurrently arise in perceptual processing, but empirical evidence that directly supports this hypothesis lacks. Here we show that the two effects concurrently modulate estimation behavior in a typical sequence of perceptual tasks. We first demonstrate that observers' estimation error as a function of both the previous stimulus and response cannot be fully described by either attractive or repulsive bias but is instead well captured by a summation of repulsion from the previous stimulus and attraction toward the previous response. We then reveal that the repulsive bias is centered on the observer's sensory encoding of the previous stimulus, which is again repelled away from the preceding trials, whereas the attractive bias is centered precisely on the previous response, which is the observer's best prediction about the incoming stimuli. Our findings provide strong evidence that sensory coding is shaped by dynamic tuning of the system to the past stimuli, inducing repulsive aftereffects, and followed by inference incorporating the prediction from the past estimation, leading to attractive serial dependence.

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Serial dependence revealed in history-dependent perceptual templates

Cited by 47 publications

References 61 publications

Sensory readout accounts for adaptation

Sensory readout accounts for adaptation

You see what you look for: Targets and distractors in visual search can cause opposing serial dependencies

Dissecting the effects of adaptive encoding and predictive inference on a single perceptual estimation

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