Serial dependence in a simulated clinical visual search task.

In everyday life, we continuously search for and classify objects in the environment around us. This kind of visual search is extremely important when performed by radiologists in cancer image interpretation and officers in airport security screening. During these tasks, observers often examine large numbers of uncorrelated images (tumor x-rays, checkpoint x-rays, etc.) one after another. An underlying assumption of such tasks is that search and recognition are independent of our past experience. Here, we simulated a visual search task reminiscent of medical image search and found that shape classification performance was strongly impaired by recent visual experience, biasing classification errors 7% more towards the previous image content. This perceptual attraction exhibited the three main tuning characteristics of Continuity Fields: serial dependence extended over 12 seconds back in time (temporal tuning), it occurred only between similar tumor-like shapes (feature tuning), and only within a limited spatial region (spatial tuning). Taken together, these results demonstrate that serial dependence influences shape perception and occurs in visual search tasks. They also raise the possibility of a detrimental impact of serial dependence in clinical and practically relevant settings, such as medical image perception

Illusion of visual stability through active perceptual serial dependence

Acknowledgments We would like to thank M. Riga for help in data collection and processing. All experimental procedures were approved by and conducted in accordance with the guidelines and regulations of the UC Berkeley IRB. Participants provided informed consent in accordance with the IRB guidelines of UC Berkeley. Funding: This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship P2ELP3_158876, Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland RIG009850 (M.M.), and National Institutes of Health grant R01 CA236793 (D.W.).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Serial dependence in a simulated clinical visual search task

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Allison Yamanashi, Yuki Murai, and Zhimin Chen for helpful comments on data analysis and preliminary drafts of the manuscript. This work was supported in part by the Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship P2ELP3_158876 (M.M.).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Serial dependence in visual perception: A meta-analysis and review

** Please leave subtitle in title field - two fields is causing issue in ORCID** Acknowledgements This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science 22H01104 to Y.M. and the National Institutes of Health grant R01 CA236793 to D.WPeer reviewedPublisher PD

Author Correction: Serial dependence in a simulated clinical visual search task.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper

Abstracts of Scottish Vision Group 2022 Meeting

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Searching for serial dependencies in the brain

Funding: National Institutes of Health supported the project : RO1CA236793 (USA) to DW. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Selective age-related changes in orientation perception

Orientation perception is a fundamental property of the visual system and an important basic processing stage for visual scene perception. Neurophysiological studies have found broader tuning curves and increased noise in orientation-selective neurons of senescent monkeys and cats, results that suggest an age-related decline in orientation perception. However, behavioral studies in humans have found no evidence for such decline, with performance being comparable for younger and older participants in orientation detection and discrimination tasks. Crucially, previous behavioral studies assessed performance for cardinal orientation only, and it is well known that the human visual system prefers cardinal over oblique orientations, a phenomenon called the oblique effect. We hypothesized that age-related changes depend on the orientation tested. In two experiments, we investigated orientation discrimination and reproduction for a large range of cardinal and oblique orientations in younger and older adults. We found substantial age-related decline for oblique but not for cardinal orientations, thus demonstrating that orientation perception selectively declines for oblique orientations. Taken together, our results serve as the missing link between previous neurophysiological and human behavioral studies on orientation perception in healthy aging.</p

Three's a crowd : Fast ensemble perception of first impressions of trustworthiness

We thank R. Chakravarthi for his helpful advice and comments on an earlier version of the manuscript, and T. Burton for help in data collection. This research was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant 220101026. The data reported in the present manuscript were presented at ECVP conference 2022 and at Plymouth EPS meeting 2023. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Release of crowding by pattern completion

In crowding, target perception deteriorates in the presence of flanking elements. Crowding is classically explained by low-level mechanisms such as pooling or feature substitution. However, we have previously shown that perceptual grouping between the target and flankers, rather than low-level mechanisms, determines crowding. There are many grouping cues that can determine crowding, such as low- and high-level feature similarity, low- and high-level pattern regularity, and good Gestalt. Here we show that pattern completion, another grouping cue that is important for crowding in foveal vision, is also important in peripheral vision. We also describe computer simulations that show how pattern completion, and crowding in general, can be partly explained by recurrent processing