Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA.
Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA; Commonwealth Honors College, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA.
Cognition. 2020 Jul;200:104250. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104250. Epub 2020 Mar 7.
Attractive serial dependence - a bias whereby the current stimulus appears more similar to the previous ones - is thought to reflect a stability mechanism integrating past and current visual signals. Prior work suggests that serial dependence originates from both perceptual and cognitive mechanisms, but the conditions under which this attractive bias occurs remain to be studied. In particular, whether serial dependence can occur solely from memory interference remains unclear. Here, we address this question by testing the hypothesis that if memory interference is sufficient to generate serial dependence, it should occur within memorized stimuli irrespective of the order of stimulus presentation. In Exp. 1, we used a numerosity estimation task in which participants estimated the number of dots of a briefly flashing dot-array comprising 8 to 32 dots. The pattern of serial dependence was found in that numerical estimates of a dot array were biased towards the numerosity of the preceding dot array. In Exp. 2, we presented a series of three such dot arrays, and cued the one to be estimated only after the whole series was presented, making the participants first form a memorized representation of the three dot arrays. The results show a pattern of attractive biases both in the forward (the stimulus presented before biases the one presented after) and the backward (the stimulus presented after biases the one presented before) directions. Overall, our results demonstrate that serial dependence can be induced solely from memory interference and that this interference can operate irrespective of the chronological order of the stimulus presentation.
吸引人的序列依赖——当前刺激看起来与前一个刺激更相似的偏差——被认为反映了一种将过去和当前视觉信号整合在一起的稳定性机制。先前的工作表明，序列依赖源于感知和认知机制，但吸引人的偏见发生的条件仍有待研究。特别是，序列依赖是否仅能仅由记忆干扰引起尚不清楚。在这里，我们通过测试以下假设来解决这个问题：如果记忆干扰足以产生序列依赖，那么它应该在记忆中的刺激中发生，而与刺激呈现的顺序无关。在实验 1 中，我们使用了一种数量估计任务，其中参与者估计短暂闪烁的点数组的点数，该数组包含 8 到 32 个点。我们发现了序列依赖的模式，即在一个点数组的数值估计中，偏向于前一个点数组的数量。在实验 2 中，我们呈现了一系列三个这样的点数组，并在整个系列呈现后才提示要估计的一个，使参与者首先形成对三个点数组的记忆表示。结果表明，在正向（呈现的刺激在前一个刺激之前有偏差）和反向（呈现的刺激在后一个刺激之前有偏差）方向都存在吸引人的偏差模式。总的来说，我们的结果表明，序列依赖可以仅由记忆干扰引起，并且这种干扰可以在不考虑刺激呈现的时间顺序的情况下发生。
