Distinguishing response from stimulus driven history biases

Abstract

Perception is shaped by past experience, both cumulative and contextual. Serial dependence reflects a contextual attractive bias to perceive or report the world as more stable than it truly is. As serial dependence has often been examined in continuous report or change detection tasks, it unclear whether attraction is towards the identity of the previous stimulus feature, or rather to the response made to indicate the perceived stimulus value on the previous trial. The physical and reported identities can be highly correlated depending on properties of the stimulus and task design. However, they are distinct values and dissociating them is important because it can reveal information about the role of sensory and non-sensory contributions to attractive biases. These alternative possibilities can be challenging to disentangle because 1) stimulus values and responses are typically strongly correlated and 2) measuring response biases using standard techniques can be confounded by context-independent biases such as cardinal bias for orientation (i.e., higher precision, but repelled, responses from vertical and horizontal orientations). Here we explore the issues and confounds related to measuring response biases using simulations. Under a range of conditions, we find that response-induced biases can be reliably distinguished from stimulus-induced biases and from confounds introduced by context-independent biases. We then applied these approaches to a delayed report dataset (N=18) and found evidence for response over a stimulus driven history bias. This work demonstrates that stimulus and response driven history biases can be reliably dissociated and provides code to implement these analysis procedures.

The representational similarity between visual perception and recent perceptual history

“…Despite the dissimilarity between the trace of the past objects in current representations and current object representations, we believe that one cannot conclude from our data that serial dependence is a decisional or memory effect rather than a perceptual effect. This question has been debated and is, in our view, still open (Cicchini et al, 2017(Cicchini et al, , 2018Fritsche et al, 2017Fritsche et al, , 2020Collins, 2020;Sheehan and Serences, 2023). Memory, perception, decision and many other psychological constructs manifest in a variety of different brain responses and patterns, and finding two dissimilar patterns does not mean that the underlying construct is different.…”

The Origin of Movement Biases During Reaching

“…One account has focused on the idea that these biases arise from distortions introduced in visual working memory. The biases are observed when participants report the location of a remembered visual target 13,17,50 , independent of the reporting method (pointing or keypresses) 17 . However, as mentioned above, similar biases are observed even when participants report the location of a proprioceptive target (i.e., participants match the position of their unseen hand).…”

The role of secondary features in serial dependence

“…Orientation space is not perceptually uniform, and notable biases have been documented ( Appelle, 1972 ; Balikou et al, 2015 ; van Bergen & Jehee, 2019 ). This is particularly relevant for the analysis of serial dependence, and previous work has recommended corrections for these biases to avoid unwanted noise ( Sheehan & Serences, 2023 ). To remove such biases, orientation adjustment responses were first demeaned and then residualized from oblique effects and orientation biases.…”

“…Here we used a nonlinear mixed model with fixed and random effects estimated on the whole group of subjects. We started from the assumption of a sinusoidal trend in orientation biases ( Balikou et al, 2015 ; Pascucci et al, 2019 ; Sheehan & Serences, 2023 ; van Bergen & Jehee, 2019 ) and fitted a cumulative sum of sinusoidal functions with a frequency increase of one cycle. The model fitting proceeded with the recursive addition of sinusoids with increasing frequency (from one to six cycles over the 0°–180° orientation range), as both fixed and random effects.…”