Cartesian coordinates scaffold stable spatial perception over time

Abstract

Visual systems exploit temporal continuity principles to achieve stable spatial perception, manifested as the serial dependence and central tendency effects. These effects are posited to reflect a smoothing process whereby past and present information integrates over time to decrease noise and stabilize perception. Meanwhile, the basic spatial coordinate—Cartesian versus polar—that scaffolds the integration process in two-dimensional continuous space remains unknown. The spatial coordinates are largely related to the allocentric and egocentric reference frames and presumably correspond with early and late processing stages in spatial perception. Here, four experiments consistently demonstrate that Cartesian outperforms polar coordinates in characterizing the serial bias—serial dependence and central tendency effect—in two-dimensional continuous spatial perception. The superiority of Cartesian coordinates is robust, independent of task environment (online and offline task), experimental length (short and long blocks), spatial context (shape of visual mask), and response modality (keyboard and mouse). Taken together, the visual system relies on the Cartesian coordinates for spatiotemporal integration to facilitate stable representation of external information, supporting the involvement of allocentric reference frame and top-down modulation in spatial perception over long time intervals.

Serial dependence in visual perception: A meta-analysis and review

“…The half violin plot indicates the median (white circle), interquartile ranges (black rectangles) and the density distribution (blue shape). Studies ranked along the abscissa are 1 ( Bae & Luck, 2019 ) 2 ( Bae & Luck, 2017 ) 3 ( Ceylan et al, 2021 ) 4 ( Bosch et al, 2022 ) 5 ( Murai & Whitney, 2021 ) 6 ( Fritsche et al, 2020 ) 7 ( Pascucci et al, 2019 ) 8 ( Fischer & Whitney, 2014 ) 9 ( Myers et al, 2018 ) 10 ( Gallagher & Benton, 2022 ) 11 ( Collins, 2019 ) 12 ( Galluzzi et al, 2022 ) 13 ( Cicchini et al, 2021 ) 14 ( van Bergen & Jehee, 2019 ) 15 ( Teng et al, 2022 ) 16 ( Wildegger et al, 2015 ) 17 ( Cicchini et al, 2018 ) 18 ( Kondo et al, 2022 ) 19 ( Samaha et al, 2019 ) 20 (M. Luo et al, 2022 ) 21 ( Abreo et al, 2023 ) 22 ( Fritsche et al, 2017 ) 23 ( Lau & Maus, 2019 ) 24 ( Rafiei et al, 2021b ) 25 ( Ceylan et al, 2021 ) 26 ( Gekas et al, 2019 ) 27 ( Cicchini et al, 2017 ) 28 ( Manassi et al, 2017 ) 29 ( Zhang & Alais, 2020 ) 30 ( Liberman et al, 2016 ) 31 ( Rafiei et al, 2021a ) 32 ( Mikellidou et al, 2021 ) 33 ( John-Saaltink et al, 2016 ) 34 ( Sheehan & Serences, 2022 ) 35 ( Kim et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Temporal tuning is the fading of serial dependence with time ( Bilacchi, Sirius, Cravo, & de Azevedo Neto, 2022 ; Bliss, Sun, & D'Esposito, 2017 ; Fischer & Whitney, 2014 ; Fritsche, Spaak, & de Lange, 2020 ). Spatial tuning is the fading of serial dependence with increasing spatial distance between sequential objects ( Collins, 2019 ; Fischer & Whitney, 2014 ; Fornaciai & Park, 2018b ; Luo, Zhang, & Luo, 2022 ). Feature tuning is the finding that serial dependence occurs for more similar sequential objects but not for dissimilar ones ( Barbosa & Compte, 2020 ; Fischer & Whitney, 2014 ; Liberman et al, 2014 ; Turbett et al, 2021 ), and attention tuning refers to the fact that serial dependence decreases with decreasing attentional resources devoted to previously experienced stimuli ( Fischer & Whitney, 2014 ; Fritsche & de Lange, 2019 ; Kim, Burr, Cicchini, & Alais, 2020 ; Rafiei, Hansmann-Roth, Whitney, Kristjansson, & Chetverikov, 2021b ).…”

Reactivated past decisions repel early sensory processing and attract late decision-making

“…The two-stage past-present interactions occurring in distinct brain regions might also illustrate the general mechanism of pastpresent influences in many cognitive functions. 14 It has been extensively debated at which stage serial dependence occurs 4,5,11,22,23 . Despite large amounts of behavioral studies, neural evidence remains mixed and scarce [25][26][27]37 .…”

“…1B), which was given by: where “Current Report”, “Current Stimulus”, and “Current Start” refer to the reported location, the location of the presented item, and the location of the presented mouse cursor in the current trial, respectively, and “Previous Report” is the reported location in the previous trial. For each participant’s data, the model was fitted for X and Y coordinates separately and the acquired β x and β y were averaged to obtain the regression coefficient for each predictor 14 .…”

“…One striking example is serial dependence, that is, perception tends to be involuntarily biased towards stimuli in previous trials [4][5][6][7][8] . Serial dependence has been robustly observed in a wide range of visual features, from simple ones like orientation 4,[9][10][11][12] , numerosity 13 , and position 14,15 to abstract ones such as facial attractiveness 16,17 and other modalities 18,19 . Despite its detrimental effects on perceptual fidelity, serial dependence is thought to reflect an optimizing strategy of the brain to increase perceptual stability and efficiency by taking advantage of inherent temporal correlations in a world that is presumably stable over a short time scale 20,21 .…”