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Serial Dependence across Perception, Attention, and Memory

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Information that has been recently perceived or remembered can bias current processing. This has been viewed as both a corrupting (e.g., proactive interference in short-term memory) and stabilizing (e.g., serial dependence in perception) phenomenon. We hypothesize that this bias is a generally adaptive aspect of brain function that leads to occasionally maladaptive outcomes.

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Previous Memory Encroaches on Current Memory

One of the most remarkable aspects of our visual experience is that we perceive a stable environment despite the constantly changing image on the retina (e.g., from eye movements, blinks, and occlusions). A core function of visual working memory is to temporarily maintain representations that bridge disruptions and facilitate that stability. However, working memory is a limited system that sometimes fails to properly segregate recently activated (but now irrelevant) representations from those

Previous Perception Integrates with Current Perception

The perception of visual stimuli often follows a pattern that could be described as proactive interference: new stimuli appear more similar to just-seen stimuli than they truly are. In an orientation judgement task, for instance, perceived orientations are biased toward the angle of previously attended stimuli [4] (Figure 1D). This serial dependence occurs for a range of features, including numerosity [5] and complex stimuli like faces 6, 7 (Figure 1E), which suggests that it is a general

What Is the Value of Temporal Integration in Perception and Memory?

Intrusions by concurrent [9] and recent [2] memories have been considered a significant limitation on visual working memory capacity and quality, because they consume a finite representational space that would otherwise be used to maintain more relevant information 1, 2. This framing assumes that recent representations should be discarded, but neglects to consider the potential advantages of using related old information to scaffold new representations. Expectations can preactivate sensory

Neural Sources of Serial Dependence in Perception and Working Memory

Despite the potential utility of serial dependence for smoothing perception and memory, we know little about how the brain produces this behavior. One possibility is that it manifests at the earliest stages of cortical sensory processing, via increased sensitivity – perhaps due to short-term synaptic plasticity [12] – among neuronal ensembles that are responsive to the feature value of the previously attended stimulus [4]. Distributed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) patterns across

Concluding Remarks

Serial dependencies in perception and working memory have been studied separately, but the parallels between them highlight the value of synthesizing these research areas moving forward [10]. We can harness the careful psychophysics and modeling data arising from perceptual serial dependence research to illuminate principles of stability in working memory. Conversely, we can exploit many decades of working memory research to inform the study of stimulus representations and adaptive control in

Acknowledgments

We thank Mark D’Esposito for insightful feedback, as well as Derek Nee and Rob White for helpful discussions and comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript.

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