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 modeling and cross-validation approaches to investigate the impact of previous stimuli and decisions on behavioral reports during adjustment and forced-choice 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, whereas decisional traces attract perceptual reports toward the recent past. In this hierarchy of serial dependence, “continuity fields” arise from the inertia of decisional templates and not from low-level sensory processes. This finding is consistent with a Two-process model of serial dependence in which the persistence of readout weights in a decision unit compensates for sensory adaptation, leading to attractive biases in sequential perception. We propose a unified account of serial dependence in which functionally distinct mechanisms, operating at different stages, promote the differentiation and integration of visual information over time.
Highlights
From moment to moment, human perception is not a high-fidelity replica of sensory input but relies heavily on past experience and short-term dependencies: what happened a moment ago has a strong impact on how we perceive the present.Vision, for example, is inherently contaminated by the immediate past: low-level visual features such as brightness, color, or motion are all perceived depending on their temporal context [1,2,3], and when the stimulation history changes, identical stimuli may well lead to dissimilar percepts [1,4,5]
We addressed whether serial dependence in visual perception depends more on past physical stimuli or on the response decision in the previous trial
Errors were fitted to a derivative of Gaussian function (DoG) in a multilevel modeling framework, and the amplitude parameter of the DoG (α) was used to quantify the magnitude of serial dependence and to test its significance
Summary
For example, is inherently contaminated by the immediate past: low-level visual features such as brightness, color, or motion are all perceived depending on their temporal context [1,2,3], and when the stimulation history changes, identical stimuli may well lead to dissimilar percepts [1,4,5] Such short-term dependencies are not peculiar to visual perception but permeate a wide range of cognitive processes, including attention [6,7,8,9], decision-making [10,11,12], memory [13,14], confidence in performance [15], and motor behavior [16]. Such ubiquity of positive biases has led some authors to hypothesize that serial dependence is an intrinsic mechanism through which our visual system exploits temporal correlations and contextual redundancies by merging similar stimuli, slightly changing over time, into a coherent and “continuous” perceptual field [26,27]
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