Serial dependence in the perception of visual variance

Abstract

The recent history of perceptual experience has been shown to influence subsequent perception. Classically, this dependence on perceptual history has been examined in sensory-adaptation paradigms, wherein prolonged exposure to a particular stimulus (e.g., a vertically oriented grating) produces changes in perception of subsequently presented stimuli (e.g., the tilt aftereffect). More recently, several studies have investigated the influence of shorter perceptual exposure with effects, referred to as serial dependence, being described for a variety of low- and high-level perceptual dimensions. In this study, we examined serial dependence in the processing of dispersion statistics, namely variance—a key descriptor of the environment and indicative of the precision and reliability of ensemble representations. We found two opposite serial dependences operating at different timescales, and likely originating at different processing levels: A positive, Bayesian-like bias was driven by the most recent exposures, dependent on feature-specific decision making and appearing only when high confidence was placed in that decision; and a longer lasting negative bias—akin to an adaptation aftereffect—becoming manifest as the positive bias declined. Both effects were independent of spatial presentation location and the similarity of other close traits, such as mean direction of the visual variance stimulus. These findings suggest that visual variance processing occurs in high-level areas but is also subject to a combination of multilevel mechanisms balancing perceptual stability and sensitivity, as with many different perceptual dimensions.

Hysteresis in the selective synchronization of brain activity to musical rhythm

“…Particularly important for perceptual stability are attractive context effects which bias perception of the current sensory input towards recently encountered stimuli. Such effects have been reported in the auditory (Arzounian et al, 2017;Chambers et al, 2017) and visual modality (Cicchini et al, 2014(Cicchini et al, , 2017Fischer and Whitney, 2014;Manassi et al, 2017;Suárez-Pinilla et al, 2018), and have also been observed for the reproduction of single temporal intervals (Cicchini et al, 2012). Similar mechanisms are arguably at play during meter perception (London, 2004).…”

The role of feature-based attention in visual serial dependence

“…In a similar vein, serial dependence is often thought to arise on the level of objects (Liberman et al, 2014, suggesting that attention to a particular stimulus feature might not be necessary as long as the object is spatially attended. Conversely, one recent study showed that serial dependence in judgments about visual variance only occurred when observers attended and reported the variance of a previous motion stimulus and not its direction (Suárez-Pinilla et al, 2018). While this result calls the independence of serial dependence from feature-based attention into question, it is unclear whether this would generalize to perceptual decisions about lower-level visual features such as orientation or numerosity.…”

“…In line with this idea, recent studies have found that perceptual decisions about a large variety of visual stimulus features are biased towards features encountered in the recent past. Such features include orientation (Cicchini & Burr, 2017;Czoschke, Fischer, Beitner, Kaiser, & Bledowski, 2018;Fritsche et al, 2017), numerosity (Cicchini, Anobile, & Burr, 2014;Corbett, Fischer, & Whitney, 2011;Fornaciai & Park, 2018a), spatial location (Bliss, Sun, & D'Esposito, 2017;Manassi, Liberman, Kosovicheva, Zhang, & Whitney, 2018;Papadimitriou, White, & Snyder, 2016), visual variance (Suárez-Pinilla, Seth, & Roseboom, 2018), face identity (Liberman, Fischer, & Whitney, 2014), emotional expression and attractiveness (Xia, Leib, & Whitney, 2016). While it is still debated whether such serial dependence biases are introduced at a perceptual stage or at a post-perceptual, decision or short-term memory stage (Fritsche et al, 2017;Bliss et al, 2017;Cicchini & Burr, 2017;Fornaciai & Park, 2018a), the ubiquity of serial dependencies in perceptual decisions is striking and suggests that serial dependencies might arise from a general computation of the brain, potentially reflecting the stabilization of neural representations.…”

A Bayesian and efficient observer model explains concurrent attractive and repulsive history biases in visual perception

“…Reports on the timescale of repulsive adaptation are more variable. While some studies have found that adaptation in response to brief stimuli is short-lived, vanishing after a few seconds (Kanai and Verstraten, 2005;Patterson et al, 2013;Pavan et al, 2012), recent studies have reported minutes-long repulsive biases in perceptual decisions (Chopin and Mamassian, 2012;Gekas et al, 2019;Suárez-Pinilla et al, 2018). Together, these studies raise the possibility that attractive serial dependence and repulsive adaptation biases may occur over dissociable timescales.…”