Serial dependence promotes object stability during occlusion

Abstract

Object identities somehow appear stable and continuous over time despite eye movements, disruptions in visibility, and constantly changing visual input. Recent results have demonstrated that the perception of orientation, numerosity, and facial identity is systematically biased (i.e., pulled) toward visual input from the recent past. The spatial region over which current orientations or face identities are pulled by previous orientations or identities, respectively, is known as the continuity field, which is temporally tuned over the past several seconds (Fischer & Whitney, 2014). This perceptual pull could contribute to the visual stability of objects over short time periods, but does it also address how perceptual stability occurs during visual discontinuities? Here, we tested whether the continuity field helps maintain perceived object identity during occlusion. Specifically, we found that the perception of an oriented Gabor that emerged from behind an occluder was significantly pulled toward the random (and unrelated) orientation of the Gabor that was seen entering the occluder. Importantly, this serial dependence was stronger for predictable, continuously moving trajectories, compared to unpredictable ones or static displacements. This result suggests that our visual system takes advantage of expectations about a stable world, helping to maintain perceived object continuity despite interrupted visibility.

Laws of concatenated perception: Vision goes for novelty, Decisions for perseverance

“…Crucially, the constant reweighting process counteracted and masked the effects of orientation adaptation, leading to the positive serial dependence reported here and in previous work 19,30,34 . The Two-process model outperformed the Gain model of serial dependence proposed by Fischer and Whitney 19 in its ability to predict the outcomes of Experiment 4.…”

“…A primary goal of this study was to determine whether serial dependence in visual perception is induced by the physical stimuli or by the response decision in the previous trial. Recent work has shown that past stimuli systematically bias the decision about the present sensory input 19,30,34 . However, the history of decisions may itself represent a source of perceptual bias that combines with or even outweighs the impact of previous stimuli 30,35 .…”

Serial dependence promotes the stability of perceived emotional expression depending on face similarity

“…The reason we find serial dependence rather than a negative aftereffect is likely because of (1) the brief exposure duration in our experiments (adaptation studies generally expose observers to an image for many seconds or even minutes), and (2) the long inter-stimulus intervals in our experiments, as well as the fact that (3) each trial had a random expression, which would tend to wash out adaptation and reduce negative aftereffects. With that in mind, both adaptation and serial dependence are likely operating here and in previous studies, albeit with different time courses, as found in the orientation domain Fritsche et al, 2017;Liberman et al, 2016;Manassi et al, 2017). In addition, adaptation and positive serial dependences share some similarities.…”

“…Beyond orientation Fritsche et al, 2017;Liberman, Zhang, & Whitney, 2016;Manassi et al, 2017) and other basic features (motion: Alais, Leung, & Van der Burg, 2017;position: Manassi et al, 2018), serial dependence occurs at higher levels of perception as well. We have recently demonstrated that the continuity field is objectselective by showing that the perception of face identity is systematically biased towards identities seen up to several seconds prior, even across changes in viewpoint (Liberman et al, 2014; see also Taubert, Alais, & Burr, 2016;Taubert, Van der Burg, & Alais, 2016;Xia et al, 2016).…”

Build-up of serial dependence in color working memory

“…Our perception depends on past experiences 1 . Serial dependence -how our current estimates are biased towards previous ones -has been described experimentally using many different paradigms [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] . In particular, paradigms including delayed-estimations of different visual features 2 , such as orientation 9,11,15 , numerosity 19 , location 3,20,21 , facial identity 22 or body size 13 .…”