International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy.
KU Leuven, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Science, Leuven, Belgium.
J Vis. 2021 May 3;21(5):6. doi: 10.1167/jov.21.5.6.
The perception of a visual event (e.g., a flock of birds) at the present moment can be biased by a previous perceptual experience (e.g., the perception of an earlier flock). Serial dependence is a perceptual bias whereby a current stimulus appears more similar to a previous one than it actually is. Whereas serial dependence emerges within several visual stimulus dimensions, whether it could simultaneously operate across different dimensions of the same stimulus (e.g., the numerosity and the duration of a visual pattern) remains unclear. Here we address this question by assessing the presence of serial dependence across duration and numerosity, two stimulus dimensions that are often associated and can bias each other. Participants performed either a duration or a numerosity discrimination task, in which they compared a constant reference with a variable test stimulus, varying along the task-relevant dimension (either duration or numerosity). Serial dependence was induced by a task-irrelevant inducer, that is, a stimulus presented before the reference and always varying in both duration and numerosity. The results show systematic serial dependencies only within the task-relevant stimulus dimension, that is, stimulus numerosity affects numerosity perception only, and duration affects duration perception only. Additionally, at least in the numerosity condition, the task-irrelevant dimension of the inducer (duration) had an opposite, repulsive effect. These findings thus show that attractive serial dependence operates in a highly specific fashion and does not transfer across different stimulus dimensions. Instead, the repulsive influence, possibly reflecting perceptual adaptation, can transfer from one dimension to another.
当前时刻对视觉事件（例如一群鸟）的感知可能会受到先前感知经验（例如对先前鸟群的感知）的影响。序列依赖是一种感知偏差，当前刺激看起来比实际更类似于先前刺激。虽然序列依赖在几个视觉刺激维度中出现，但它是否可以同时在同一刺激的不同维度（例如视觉模式的数量和持续时间）上运作尚不清楚。在这里，我们通过评估持续时间和数量这两个经常相关且可以相互影响的刺激维度上的序列依赖来解决这个问题。参与者执行持续时间或数量辨别任务，在该任务中，他们将恒定参考与变量测试刺激进行比较，该变量刺激沿与任务相关的维度（持续时间或数量）变化。序列依赖是由任务无关的诱发刺激引起的，即参考之前呈现的刺激，并且在持续时间和数量上始终变化。结果仅在任务相关的刺激维度内显示出系统的序列依赖，即刺激数量仅影响数量感知，而持续时间仅影响持续时间感知。此外，至少在数量条件下，诱发刺激的任务无关维度（持续时间）具有相反的排斥效应。因此，这些发现表明吸引力序列依赖以高度特定的方式运作，并且不会跨不同的刺激维度转移。相反，排斥影响可能反映了感知适应，可以从一个维度转移到另一个维度。
