Effect of spatiotemporally changing environment on serial dependence in ensemble representations

Abstract

SummaryThe recent visual past has a strong impact on our current perception. Recent studies of serial dependence in perception show that low-level adaptation repels our current perception away from previous stimuli1–5 whereas post-perceptual decision attracts perceptual report toward the immediate past6–12. In their studies, these repulsive and attractive biases were observed with different task demands perturbing ongoing sequential process. Therefore, it is unclear whether the opposite biases arise naturally in navigating complex real-life environments. Here we only manipulated the environmental statistics to characterize how serially dependent perceptual decisions unfold in spatiotemporally changing visual environments. During sequential mean orientation adjustment task on the array of Gabor patches, we found that the repulsion effect dominated only when ensemble variance increased across consecutive trials whereas the attraction effect prevailed when ensemble variance decreased or remained the same. The observed attractive bias by high- to-low-variance stimuli and repulsive bias by low-to-high-variance stimuli were reinforced by the repeated exposure to the low and the high ensemble variance, respectively. Further, this variance-dependent differential pattern of serial dependence in ensemble representation remained the same regardless of whether observers had a prior knowledge of environmental statistics or not. We used a Bayesian observer model constrained by visual adaptation13,14 to provide a unifying account of both attractive and repulsive bias in perception. Our results establish that the temporal integration and segregation of visual information is flexibly adjusted through variance adaptation.

Cross-Modality Evidence for Reduced Choice History Biases in Psychosis-Prone Individuals

“…23,[33][34][35] Indeed, choice history biases scale with uncertainty 19,21,36,37 and adapt to environmental statistics. 21,38 Pascucci and colleagues suggested that the past influences current perception in two ways. 39 Short-term adaptation repels current perception away from past experience, while previous experience attracts perception towards the recent past.…”

Perceptual history biases in serial ensemble representation

“…Many studies in the past two decades investigated the efficient nature of perceptual averaging from a set of items (see Introduction). While the main focus in this literature is rapid feature integration from the current trial to form a summary representation, only a few tested the influence of history and found contraction biases in mean estimation tasks for facial expressions ( Crawford et al, 2019 ), orientation ( Manassi et al, 2017 ; Son et al, 2021 ; Tanrikulu et al, 2021 ), and brightness ( Crawford et al, 2019 ). In these experiments, ensembles are presented all at once for a short time, but in real-world environments, groups of items are often dynamically perceived over longer time scales.…”

“…The latter is known in literature as the central tendency bias (i.e., the contraction of perceptual judgments toward the mean, or the midpoint of the overall stimulus distribution), as was first described more than a century ago by Hollingworth (1910) . Although serial dependence and central tendency have generally been discussed separately (e.g., Crawford, Corbin, & Landy, 2019 ; Manassi et al, 2017 ; Son et al, 2021 ), they are statistically correlated in many cases as they contract perception toward the same direction (see Tong & Dubé, 2022 ). Whether these biases by priors relating to different time windows originate from different underlying mechanisms, as suggested by the observation that their relative contributions to perception differ in specific populations ( Lieder et al, 2019 ) or from a single mechanism ( Boboeva et al, 2022 ; Tong & Dubé, 2022 ), one needs to study whether they have different characteristics, weights, and impacts on behavior.…”

“…The various effects of recent events were shown to occur at different processing levels, from early perception to working memory ( Bliss et al, 2017 ; Kiyonaga et al, 2017 ), and for different visual features such as orientation ( Fritsche et al, 2017 ), position ( Manassi et al, 2018 ), and face expression ( Liberman et al, 2018 ). While most studies describe the common attraction (positive) bias to recent stimuli (e.g., Cicchini et al, 2018 ; Fischer & Whitney, 2014 ; Liberman et al, 2018 ), others found it to be negative (i.e., a repulsion bias) under specific conditions ( Fritsche et al, 2017 ; Son et al, 2021 ). Serial dependence was also found to occur in ensemble statistics judgments with both attraction ( Manassi et al, 2017 ; Son et al, 2021 ; Suárez-Pinilla et al, 2018 ; Tanrıkulu et al, 2021 ) and repulsion ( Son et al, 2021 ; Suárez-Pinilla et al, 2018 ) biases by recently perceived ensembles, depending on different factors.…”

“…While most studies describe the common attraction (positive) bias to recent stimuli (e.g., Cicchini et al, 2018 ; Fischer & Whitney, 2014 ; Liberman et al, 2018 ), others found it to be negative (i.e., a repulsion bias) under specific conditions ( Fritsche et al, 2017 ; Son et al, 2021 ). Serial dependence was also found to occur in ensemble statistics judgments with both attraction ( Manassi et al, 2017 ; Son et al, 2021 ; Suárez-Pinilla et al, 2018 ; Tanrıkulu et al, 2021 ) and repulsion ( Son et al, 2021 ; Suárez-Pinilla et al, 2018 ) biases by recently perceived ensembles, depending on different factors.…”