Bae Gi-Yeul, Chen Kuo-Wei
Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.
J Vis. 2025 Feb 3;25(2):9. doi: 10.1167/jov.25.2.9.
A decade of research has demonstrated that the reported perception of a new stimulus can be biased by task-irrelevant prior stimuli. However, existing studies have primarily focused on explaining the direction and magnitude of this bias effect, often neglecting other relevant aspects of perceptual behavior that may also be influenced by prior stimuli. In this study, we examined how decision speed for a new stimulus might be influenced by prior stimuli in motion-direction estimation tasks. We found that direction reports exhibited a repulsive serial bias along with a systematic response time (RT) effect, where reports were faster when the prior motion direction was more dissimilar to the current motion direction. Follow-up experiments replicated this RT effect and showed that it occurred only when repulsive serial bias was evident. Subsequent analyses revealed that the RT effect was positively correlated with repulsive serial bias, indicating that both effects are driven by common underlying mechanisms. Together, these results demonstrate that prior stimuli not only bias but also modulate response speed to new stimuli, suggesting that existing theories should incorporate decisional mechanisms that influence response speed to fully account for the serial bias phenomenon.
十年的研究表明，对新刺激的报告感知可能会受到与任务无关的先前刺激的影响。然而，现有研究主要集中在解释这种偏差效应的方向和大小，往往忽略了感知行为的其他相关方面，而这些方面也可能受到先前刺激的影响。在本研究中，我们研究了在运动方向估计任务中，先前刺激如何影响对新刺激的决策速度。我们发现，方向报告表现出排斥性序列偏差以及系统性反应时间（RT）效应，即当前运动方向与先前运动方向差异越大，报告速度越快。后续实验重复了这种RT效应，并表明只有当排斥性序列偏差明显时才会出现这种效应。随后的分析表明，RT效应与排斥性序列偏差呈正相关，这表明这两种效应是由共同的潜在机制驱动的。这些结果共同表明，先前刺激不仅会产生偏差，还会调节对新刺激的反应速度，这表明现有理论应纳入影响反应速度的决策机制，以充分解释序列偏差现象。
