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.

中文翻译：

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记忆刺激之间具有吸引力的序列依赖性。

有吸引力的序列依赖性（当前的刺激看起来与以前的刺激更为相似）被认为反映了整合过去和当前视觉信号的稳定机制。先前的工作表明，序列依赖性源于感知和认知机制，但是这种有吸引力的偏差发生的条件还有待研究。尤其是，串行依赖性是否可能仅由存储器干扰引起仍然不清楚。在这里，我们通过检验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性，则无论记忆刺激的顺序如何，记忆干扰都应该在记忆刺激中发生。在实验中 在图1中，我们使用了数字估计任务，其中参与者估计了由8到32个点组成的短暂闪烁点阵列的点数。发现序列相关性的模式是，点阵列的数值估计偏向于先前点阵列的数量。在实验中 如图2所示，我们提出了三个这样的点阵的系列，并提示了要在整个系列提出后才进行估计的方案，使参与者首先形成了三个点阵的记忆形式。结果表明，在正向（刺激在偏向之前呈现的刺激之后）和向后（刺激在偏向之前呈现的刺激之后）方向上都有有吸引力的偏向模式。总的来说，我们的结果表明，序列依赖性可以仅由记忆干扰引起，并且这种干扰可以起作用，而与刺激表现的时间顺序无关。