Humans have remarkable abilities to construct a stable visual world from continuously changing input. There is increasing evidence that momentary visual input blends with previous input to preserve perceptual continuity. Most studies have shown that such influences can be traced to characteristics of the attended object at a given moment. Little is known about the role of ignored stimuli in creating this continuity. This is important since while some input is selected for processing, other input must be actively ignored for efficient selection of the task-relevant stimuli. We asked whether attended targets and actively ignored distractor stimuli in an odd-one-out search task would bias observers' perception differently. Our observers searched for an oddly oriented line among distractors and were occasionally asked to report the orientation of the last visual search target they saw in an adjustment task. Our results show that at least two opposite biases from past stimuli influence current perception: A positive bias caused by serial dependence pulls perception of the target toward the previous target features, while a negative bias induced by the to-be-ignored distractor features pushes perception of the target away from the distractor distribution. Our results suggest that to-be-ignored items produce a perceptual bias that acts in parallel with other biases induced by attended items to optimize perception. Our results are the first to demonstrate how actively ignored information facilitates continuity in visual perception.

中文翻译：

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优化感知：参与和忽略的刺激会产生相反的感知偏差。

人类具有通过不断变化的输入来构建稳定的视觉世界的非凡能力。越来越多的证据表明，瞬时视觉输入与以前的输入混合在一起可以保持感知的连续性。大多数研究表明，这种影响可以追溯到给定时刻照看对象的特征。人们对被忽略的刺激在创造这种连续性中所起的作用知之甚少。这很重要，因为在选择某些输入进行处理时，必须有效地忽略其他输入才能有效选择与任务相关的刺激。我们询问参加目标并主动忽略奇异一出搜索任务中的干扰因素刺激是否会以不同的方式偏向观察者的感知。我们的观察者在分散器之间寻找一条奇怪的方向的线，并偶尔被要求报告他们在调整任务中看到的最后一个视觉搜索目标的方向。我们的结果表明，过去刺激产生的至少两个相反的偏见会影响当前的知觉：由序列依赖性引起的正偏将目标的知觉拉向先前的目标特征，而被忽略的干扰物特征引起的负偏则会推动知觉远离干扰物分布的目标。我们的研究结果表明，被忽略的项目会产生一种感知偏见，该偏见与参与项目引起的其他偏见同时发挥作用，以优化感知。我们的结果首次证明主动忽略的信息如何促进视觉感知的连续性。