A Bayesian and efficient observer model explains concurrent attractive and repulsive history biases in visual perception

Abstract
Data availability
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Abstract

Human perceptual decisions can be repelled away from (repulsive adaptation) or attracted towards recent visual experience (attractive serial dependence). It is currently unclear whether and how these repulsive and attractive biases interact during visual processing and what computational principles underlie these history dependencies. Here we disentangle repulsive and attractive biases by exploring their respective timescales. We find that perceptual decisions are concurrently attracted towards the short-term perceptual history and repelled from stimuli experienced up to minutes into the past. The temporal pattern of short-term attraction and long-term repulsion cannot be captured by an ideal Bayesian observer model alone. Instead, it is well captured by an ideal observer model with efficient encoding and Bayesian decoding of visual information in a slowly changing environment. Concurrent attractive and repulsive history biases in perceptual decisions may thus be the consequence of the need for visual processing to simultaneously satisfy constraints of efficiency and stability.

Data availability

All data and code are openly available on the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior repository at http://hdl.handle.net/11633/aac4scwf.

The following previously published data sets were used

(2017) Opposite Effects of Recent History on Perception and Decision
Donders Repository, data.donders.ru.nl.

http://hdl.handle.net/11633/di.dccn.DSC_3018012.11_898

Article and author information

Author details

Matthias Fritsche

Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

For correspondence
m.fritsche@donders.ru.nl

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-5835-9057
Eelke Spaak

Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-2018-3364
Floris P de Lange

Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Competing interests
Floris P de Lange, Senior editor, eLife.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-6730-1452

Funding

H2020 European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant 678286,'Contextvision')

Matthias Fritsche
Floris P de Lange

Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO Veni grant 016.Veni.198.065)

Eelke Spaak

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: The study followed institutional guidelines of the local ethics committee (CMO region Arnhem-Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Protocol CMO2014/288), including informed consent of all participants.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.