Individual differences reveal similarities in serial dependencies across perceptual tasks, but no relation to serial dependencies for oculomotor behavior

Abstract

Serial dependence effects from one trial to the next have been observed across a wide range of perceptual tasks, as well as for oculomotor behavior. This opens up the question of whether the effects observed across all of these studies share underlying mechanisms. Here we measured the same group of observers across four different tasks, two perceptual (color judgments and orientation judgments) and two oculomotor (tracking of moving targets and the pupil light reflex). On the group level, we observed significant attractive serial dependence effects for all tasks, except the pupil response. The rare absence of a serial dependence effect for the reflex like pupil light response suggests that sequential effects require cortical processing or even higher-level cognition. In the following step, we leveraged reliable individual differences between observers in the other tasks to test whether there is a trait-like behavior of some observers showing stronger serial dependence effects across all of these tasks. We observed a significant relationship in the strength of serial dependence for the two perceptual experiments, but no relation between the perceptual tasks and oculomotor behavior. This indicates, differences in processing between perception and oculomotor control and the absence of a general trait-like behavior that affects all tasks similarly. However, the shared variance in the strength of serial dependence effects across different perceptual tasks indicates the importance of a similar positive decision bias present, that is reliably different between observers and consistent across different serial dependence tasks.