Serial dependence for oculomotor control depends on early sensory signals

Serial dependence in visual perception: A review

“…Similarly, using naturalistic stimuli in virtual reality, Tanrikulu, Pascucci, and Kristjánsson (2021) showed that serial dependence in orientation judgments was the same whether an object (e.g., a regular toothbrush) was constant or switched to another object within the same category (an electric toothbrush) or even to a different object from a different category (i.e., a sword). Goettker and Stewart (2022) also demonstrated that serial dependence in oculomotor responses to dynamic stimuli occurs between completely different objects (moving car vs. blob). Finally, serial dependence can be found between sequential (i.e., number of events over time) and simultaneous (i.e., number of items in space) numerosity representations and between semantic (presenting a numeral) and simultaneous representations of numerosity magnitudes ( Fornaciai & Park, 2022 ).…”

“…For example, Ceylan, Herzog and Pascucci (2021) have shown that serial dependence can occur for elementary visual features with completely distinct stimuli (e.g., the scenario in Figure 1 E), suggesting that the bias may also involve relatively abstract representations, independently of the continuity of stimulus identity (i.e., orientation might be commonly represented as a tilted line, even if it belongs to different visual objects) ( Ceylan et al., 2021 ; Kwak & Curtis, 2022 ). Crucially, when serial dependence is observed for low-level features belonging to different visual objects, there are two candidate explanations: This might reflect perceptual history effects at low-level processing stages, independently of the object ( Goettker & Stewart, 2022 ), or effects of high-level representations that reflect how information is maintained in working memory ( Kwak & Curtis, 2022 ). In other words, the orientation of a current stimulus may be biased toward the orientation of a perceptually distinct previous stimulus, because the bias occurs at early orientation processing levels (e.g., V1) or because “orientation” is the relevant feature and can be represented as a single line.…”

Task feedback suggests a post-perceptual component to serial dependence

“…Serial dependencies have been observed across a range of high- and low-level perceptual dimensions, task structures, and sensory modalities (Burr & Cicchini, 2014; Fischer & Whitney, 2014; Liberman et al, 2014; Cicchini et al, 2014; Xia et al, 2016; Alais et al, 2017; Bliss et al, 2017; Cicchini et al, 2017; Cicchini et al, 2018; Kiyonaga et al, 2017; van Bergen & Jehee, 2017; Clifford et al, 2018; Fornaciai & Park, 2018; Liberman et al, 2018; Alexi et al, 2018; Manassi et al, 2018; Suárez-Pinilla et al, 2018; Fritsche & de Lange, 2019; Van der Burg et al, 2019; Pascucci et al, 2019; Samaha et al, 2019; Barbosa & Compte, 2020; Kim et al, 2020; Cicchini et al, 2021; de Azevedo Neto & Bartels, 2021; Ceylan et al, 2021; Kim & Alais, 2021; Pascucci & Plomp, 2021; Manassi & Whitney, 2022; Goettker & Stewart, 2022). It is clear that serial dependence is not simply due to hysteresis in motor processes as the effect does not depend on the need for a motor response (Fisher & Whitney, 2014; Cicchini et al, 2018; Manassi et al, 2018; Fornaciai & Park, 2018).…”

“…Recent work has identified retinal error signals as a source of serial dependence in oculomotor behavior (Goettker & Stewart, 2022), isolating the effects to the earliest stages of visual processing. Serial dependence has been demonstrated to be retinotopic for orientation judgments for stimuli up to 22 degrees of visual angle apart (Collins, 2019), which led to the speculation that serial dependence may also arise at later stages of visual processing through the activation of inferior temporal neurons with wide receptive fields by orientation-selective neurons in striate and extrastriate cortex, which then feed back to lower visual areas, elevating activation of neurons with similar orientation tuning and biasing the population response toward the recently encountered orientation on the next trial.…”

Searching for serial dependencies in the brain

“…[ 6 ]. In fact, serial dependence probably happens at every level of brain processing, from the earliest [ 7 ] to the highest levels [ 6 ]. It was recently proposed that the computational goal of serial dependence is to promote more stable interpretations of the world [ 1 ].…”