Serial Dependence in Dermatological Judgments

Abstract

Serial Dependence is a ubiquitous visual phenomenon in which sequentially viewed images appear more similar than they actually are, thus facilitating an efficient and stable perceptual experience in human observers. Although serial dependence is adaptive and beneficial in the naturally autocorrelated visual world, a smoothing perceptual experience, it might turn maladaptive in artificial circumstances, such as medical image perception tasks, where visual stimuli are randomly sequenced. Here, we analyzed 758,139 skin cancer diagnostic records from an online app, and we quantified the semantic similarity between sequential dermatology images using a computer vision model as well as human raters. We then tested whether serial dependence in perception occurs in dermatological judgments as a function of image similarity. We found significant serial dependence in perceptual discrimination judgments of lesion malignancy. Moreover, the serial dependence was tuned to the similarity in the images, and it decayed over time. The results indicate that relatively realistic store-and-forward dermatology judgments may be biased by serial dependence. These findings help in understanding one potential source of systematic bias and errors in medical image perception tasks and hint at useful approaches that could alleviate the errors due to serial dependence.

Super recognizers: Increased sensitivity or reduced biases? Insights from serial dependence

“…Adding to previous findings ( Bosch, Fritsche, Utzerath, Buitelaar, & de Lange, 2022 ; Lieder et al., 2019 ; Manassi et al., 2021 ; Ren, Li, Pietralla, Manassi, & Whitney, 2023 ; Stein et al., 2020 ), the present results reinforce the idea of serial dependence as a stable ( Kondo, Murai, & Whitney, 2022 ; Trübutschek & Melloni, 2023 ), pervasive ( Manassi, Murai, & Whitney, 2018b ), and general mechanism across different stimuli, tasks, and populations ( Manassi et al., 2023 ). Importantly, strictly speaking, this does not imply that serial dependence is expressed in a uniform, fixed manner across different types of stimuli.…”

Visual continuum in non-human animals: serial dependence revealed in dogs

“…In addition to deepening knowledge on the serial dependence of orientation [4][5][6], studies have demonstrated the same effect on many other low-level visual attributes, such as the perception of motion [4,7], colour [8], position [9] and shape [10,11]. Serial dependence has also been reported for more complex attributes, such as numerosity [12][13][14], face identity [15] and attractiveness [16], emotional expression [10,17,18] and even affective appraisal of food [19] and dermatological judgment [20].…”