The perceived stability of scenes: serial dependence in ensemble representations

Abstract

We are continuously surrounded by a noisy and ever-changing environment. Instead of analyzing all the elements in a scene, our visual system has the ability to compress an enormous amount of visual information into ensemble representations, such as perceiving a forest instead of every single tree. Still, it is unclear why such complex scenes appear to be the same from moment to moment despite fluctuations, noise, and discontinuities in retinal images. The general effects of change blindness are usually thought to stabilize scene perception, making us unaware of minor inconsistencies between scenes. Here, we propose an alternative, that stable scene perception is actively achieved by the visual system through global serial dependencies: the appearance of scene gist is sequentially dependent on the gist perceived in previous moments. To test this hypothesis, we used summary statistical information as a proxy for “gist” level, global information in a scene. We found evidence for serial dependence in summary statistical representations. Furthermore, we show that this kind of serial dependence occurs at the ensemble level, where local elements are already merged into global representations. Taken together, our results provide a mechanism through which serial dependence can promote the apparent consistency of scenes over time.

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

“…The reason we find serial dependence rather than a negative aftereffect is likely because of (1) the brief exposure duration in our experiments (adaptation studies generally expose observers to an image for many seconds or even minutes), and (2) the long inter-stimulus intervals in our experiments, as well as the fact that (3) each trial had a random expression, which would tend to wash out adaptation and reduce negative aftereffects. With that in mind, both adaptation and serial dependence are likely operating here and in previous studies, albeit with different time courses, as found in the orientation domain Fritsche et al, 2017;Liberman et al, 2016;Manassi et al, 2017). In addition, adaptation and positive serial dependences share some similarities.…”

“…Participants then saw a test screen containing a random adjustment face, which they modified by scrolling through the continuous expression wheel to match the target expression. After picking a match expression, participants saw a 1000-ms noise mask followed by a 1000-ms fixation cross before the next trial began Cicchini et al, 2014;Cicchini, Mikellidou, & Burr, 2017;Corbett et al, 2011;Liberman et al, 2014;Manassi et al, 2017). In Experiment 3, serial dependence was not ethnicity selective.…”

“…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).…”

“…Previous studies have shown that the perception of orientation, numerosity, and other low-level stimulus features is serially dependent-systematically biased (i.e., pulled) towards similar visual input from the recent past (Cicchini, Anobile, & Burr, 2014;Corbett, Fischer, &Taubert, Alais, & Burr, 2016;Xia, Leib, & Whitney, 2016), as well as in feature space (object similarity; Fritsche, Mostert, & de Lange, 2017;Liberman, Fischer, & Whitney, 2014;Manassi, Liberman, Chaney, & Whitney, 2017). The spatio-temporal region over which current object features, such as orientation, are pulled by previously seen features is known as the Continuity Field (CF).…”

Build-up of serial dependence in color working memory

“…Our perception depends on past experiences 1 . Serial dependence -how our current estimates are biased towards previous ones -has been described experimentally using many different paradigms [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] . In particular, paradigms including delayed-estimations of different visual features 2 , such as orientation 9,11,15 , numerosity 19 , location 3,20,21 , facial identity 22 or body size 13 .…”