Abstract
The world tends to be stable from moment to moment, leading to strong serial correlations in natural scenes. As similar stimuli usually require similar behavioural responses, it is highly likely that the brain has developed strategies to leverage these regularities. A good deal of recent psychophysical evidence is beginning to show that the brain is sensitive to serial correlations, causing strong drifts in observer responses towards previously seen stimuli. However, it is still not clear that this tendency leads to a functional advantage. Here, we test a formal model of optimal serial dependence and show that as predicted, serial dependence in an orientation reproduction task is dependent on current stimulus reliability, with less precise stimuli, such as low spatial frequency oblique Gabors, exhibiting the strongest effects. We also show that serial dependence depends on the similarity between two successive stimuli, again consistent with the behaviour of an ideal observer aiming at minimizing reproduction errors. Lastly, we show that serial dependence leads to faster response times, indicating that the benefits of serial integration go beyond reproduction error. Overall our data show that serial dependence has a beneficial role at various levels of perception, consistent with the idea that the brain exploits the temporal redundancy of the visual scene as an optimization strategy.
Highlights
As most objects in the environment are relatively stable over time, there are large temporal redundancies in the spatio-temporal flow of information
Functional magnetic resonance imaging results [16] have shown that neural representations in the primary visual cortex (V1) were biased towards previous perceptual decisions, demonstrating a direct neural correlate of serial dependence, and suggesting that the effects occur early in primary visual cortex
We explore how serial dependence changes as a function of inter-stimulus orientation change
Summary
As most objects in the environment are relatively stable over time, there are large temporal redundancies in the spatio-temporal flow of information. Two recent papers [2,3] introduced a new psychophysical paradigm, serial dependence, which provided direct evidence of how a system incorporates past information into the perception of the current stimulus These effects have been confirmed with a variety of stimuli and tasks, from simple orientation judgements [3,4,5], numerosity [2], position [6,7], facial identity and expression [8,9], eye gaze [10], pulchritude [11] or body size [12], to complex judgements such as summary statistics [13], variance [14] and confidence [15]. All this evidence shows that serial dependence increases the accrual of sensory information, improving efficiency
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