Memory reports are biased by all relevant contents of working memory

Abstract

Sensory input is inherently noisy while the world is inherently predictable. When multiple observations of the same object are available, integration of the available information necessarily increases the reliability of a world estimate. Optimal integration of multiple instances of sensory evidence has already been demonstrated during multisensory perception but could benefit unimodal perception as well. In the present study 330 participants observed a sequence of four orientations and were cued to report one of them. Reports were biased by all simultaneously memorized items that were similar and relevant to the target item, weighted by their reliability (signal-to-noise ratio). Orientations presented before and presented after the target biased report, demonstrating that the bias emerges in memory and not (exclusively) during perception or encoding. Only attended, task-relevant items biased report. We suggest that these results reflect how the visual system integrates information that is sampled from the same object at consecutive timepoints to promote perceptual stability and behavioural effectiveness in a dynamic world. We suggest that similar response biases, such as serial dependence, might be instances of a more general mechanism of working memory averaging. Data is available at https://osf.io/embcf/.