Serial dependence entails an attractive bias based on the recent history of stimulation, making the current stimulus appear more similar to the preceding one. Although serial dependence is ubiquitous in perception, its nature and mechanisms remain unclear. Here, in two independent experiments, we test the hypothesis that this bias originates from high-level processing stages at the level of abstract information processing (Exp. 1) or at the level of judgment (Exp. 2). In Experiment 1, serial dependence was induced by a task-irrelevant “inducer” stimulus in a numerosity discrimination task, similarly to previous studies. Importantly, in this experiment, the inducers were either arrays of dots similar to the task-relevant stimuli (e.g., 12 dots), or symbolic numbers (e.g., the numeral “12”). Both dots and symbol inducers successfully yielded attractive serial dependence biases, suggesting that abstract information about an image is sufficient to bias the perception of the current stimulus. In Experiment 2, participants received feedback about their responses in each trial of a numerosity estimation task, which was designed to assess whether providing external information about the accuracy of judgments would modulate serial dependence. Providing feedback significantly increased the attractive serial dependence effect, suggesting that external information at the level of judgment may modulate the weight of past perceptual information during the processing of the current image. Overall, our results support the idea that, although serial dependence may operate at a perceptual level, it originates from high-level processing stages at the level of abstract information processing and at the level of judgment.

连续依赖需要基于最近的刺激历史的有吸引力的偏见，使当前的刺激看起来更类似于前一个。虽然串行依赖在感知中无处不在，但其性质和机制仍不清楚。在这里，在两个独立的实验中，我们检验了这种偏见源于抽象信息处理（实验 1）或判断级别（实验 2）的高级处理阶段的假设。在实验 1 中，与之前的研究类似，在数量辨别任务中，与任务无关的“诱导物”刺激会诱导连续依赖。重要的是，在这个实验中，诱导物要么是类似于任务相关刺激的点阵列（例如，12 个点），要么是符号数字（例如，数字“12”）。点和符号诱导器都成功地产生了有吸引力的序列依赖偏差，这表明关于图像的抽象信息足以使当前刺激的感知产生偏差。在实验 2 中，参与者在每次数量估计任务试验中收到关于他们的反应的反馈，该任务旨在评估提供有关判断准确性的外部信息是否会调节序列依赖性。提供反馈显着增加了有吸引力的序列依赖效应，这表明判断层面的外部信息可能会在当前图像处理过程中调节过去感知信息的权重。总的来说，我们的结果支持这样的观点，尽管串行依赖可能在感知层面上起作用，