Perceptual decisions are biased toward relevant prior choices

Abstract

Perceptual decisions are biased by recent perceptual history—a phenomenon termed 'serial dependence.' Here, we investigated what aspects of perceptual decisions lead to serial dependence, and disambiguated the influences of low-level sensory information, prior choices and motor actions. Participants discriminated whether a brief visual stimulus lay to left/right of the screen center. Following a series of biased ‘prior’ location discriminations, subsequent ‘test’ location discriminations were biased toward the prior choices, even when these were reported via different motor actions (using different keys), and when the prior and test stimuli differed in color. By contrast, prior discriminations about an irrelevant stimulus feature (color) did not substantially influence subsequent location discriminations, even though these were reported via the same motor actions. Additionally, when color (not location) was discriminated, a bias in prior stimulus locations no longer influenced subsequent location discriminations. Although low-level stimuli and motor actions did not trigger serial-dependence on their own, similarity of these features across discriminations boosted the effect. These findings suggest that relevance across perceptual decisions is a key factor for serial dependence. Accordingly, serial dependence likely reflects a high-level mechanism by which the brain predicts and interprets new incoming sensory information in accordance with relevant prior choices.

Increased influence of prior choices on perceptual decisions in autism

“…7B ) did not correlate significantly with ADOS scores (Figure 7 figure supplement 2, r 14 = -0.42, p = 0.10). In line with previous findings that using the same action boosts the prior choice effect (Feigin et al, 2021), also here choice biases = [-0.25, 1.15], t-test). Also, response times did not differ between the two groups: mean ± SD = 0.83 ± 0.15s and 0.87 ± 0.12s, for ASD and controls respectively (calculated across all discriminations, i.e., pooling prior and test discriminations; t 30 = -0.85, p = 0.4, Cohen's d = 0.3, 95% CI = [-0.99, 0.40], t-test).…”

“…A positive influence of prior choices has also been documented in many studies (Kaneko and Sakai, 2015;Talluri et al, 2018;Feigin et al, 2021).…”

“…However, it does not address the underlying reasonspecifically, it does not dissociate the separate influences of prior stimuli from prior choices, which may be different. Recent studies have shown that the influence of recent prior stimuli and choices might be in opposite directionsi.e., the effects or prior stimuli could be adaptive (reflected by a negative shift) whereas recent choices may lead to a consistency bias (Kaneko and Sakai, 2015;Talluri et al, 2018;Pascucci et al, 2019;Feigin et al, 2021). Thus, the effects of prior stimuli and choices could cancel each other out.…”

“…However, these studies of reduced serial dependence and reduced adaptation in ASD only take into account the previous stimuli, and not the previous choices. This is important because there is mounting evidence that prior perceptual decisions (rather than sensory stimuli) elicit the positive effect of serial dependence (Kaneko and Sakai, 2015;Talluri et al, 2018;Feigin et al, 2021). Thus the overall impact of recent sensory experience might reflect a composite effect, e.g., of repulsion away from the prior stimuli (adaptation) and attraction toward the prior choices (serial dependence) which can, at least partially, cancel one-another (Fritsche et al, 2017;Pascucci et al, 2019).…”

“…In this study we aimed to dissociate how recent prior stimuli and choices (over a time-course of seconds) affect perceptual decisions in ASD. For this purpose, we tested the performance of individuals with ASD and controls in a visual location discrimination task designed to induce short-term biases over several trials (Feigin et al, 2021). In addition, we reanalyzed data from a previous study of multisensory (visual-vestibular) heading direction discrimination performed on a different group of participants (Zaidel et al, 2015).…”