What we see in the present is affected by what we saw in the recent past. Serial dependence, a bias making a current stimulus appear more similar to a previous one, has been indeed shown to be ubiquitous in vision. At the neural level, serial dependence is accompanied by a signature of stimulus history (i.e., past stimulus information) emerging from early visual-evoked activity. However, whether this neural signature effectively reflects the behavioral bias is unclear. Here we address this question by assessing the neural (electrophysiological) and behavioral signature of stimulus history in human subjects (both male and female), in the context of numerosity, duration, and size perception. First, our results show that while the behavioral effect is task-dependent, its neural signature also reflects task-irrelevant dimensions of a past stimulus, suggesting a partial dissociation between the mechanisms mediating the encoding of stimulus history and the behavioral bias itself. Second, we show that performing a task is not a necessary condition to observe the neural signature of stimulus history, but that in the presence of an active task such a signature is significantly amplified. Finally, and more importantly, we show that the pattern of brain activity in a relatively early latency window (starting at ~35-65 ms after stimulus onset) significantly predicts the behavioral effect. Overall, our results thus demonstrate that the encoding of past stimulus information in neural signals does indeed reflect serial dependence, and that serial dependence occurs at a relatively early level of visual processing.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT What we perceive is determined not only by the information reaching our sensory organs, but also by the context in which the information is embedded. What we saw in the recent past (perceptual history) can indeed modulate the perception of a current stimulus in an attractive way, a bias that is ubiquitous in vision. Here we show that this bias can be predicted by the pattern of brain activity reflecting the encoding of past stimulus information, very early after the onset of a stimulus. This in turn suggests that the integration of past and present sensory information mediating the attractive bias occurs early in the visual processing stream, and likely involves early visual cortices.

我们现在看到的东西受到我们最近看到的东西的影响。序列依赖性是一种使当前刺激看起来与之前的刺激更加相似的偏差，它确实已被证明在视觉中普遍存在。在神经水平上，序列依赖性伴随着早期视觉诱发活动中出现的刺激历史特征（即过去的刺激信息）。然而，这种神经特征是否有效反映了行为偏差尚不清楚。在这里，我们通过在数量、持续时间和大小感知的背景下评估人类受试者（男性和女性）刺激历史的神经（电生理）和行为特征来解决这个问题。首先，我们的结果表明，虽然行为效应与任务相关，但其神经特征也反映了过去刺激的与任务无关的维度，这表明介导刺激历史编码的机制与行为偏差本身之间存在部分分离。其次，我们表明执行任务并不是观察刺激历史的神经特征的必要条件，但在存在活动任务的情况下，这种特征会显着放大。最后，更重要的是，我们表明，相对较早的潜伏期窗口（从刺激开始后约 35-65 毫秒开始）的大脑活动模式可以显着预测行为效应。总的来说，我们的结果表明，神经信号中过去刺激信息的编码确实反映了序列依赖性，并且序列依赖性发生在视觉处理的相对早期水平。

意义声明我们感知到的内容不仅取决于到达我们感觉器官的信息，还取决于信息嵌入的背景。我们在不久的过去所看到的（感知历史）确实可以以一种有吸引力的方式调节对当前刺激的感知，这是一种在视觉中普遍存在的偏见。在这里，我们表明，这种偏差可以通过刺激发生后很早就反映过去刺激信息编码的大脑活动模式来预测。这反过来表明，调解吸引力偏差的过去和现在的感觉信息的整合发生在视觉处理流的早期，并且可能涉及早期的视觉皮层。