Multiple and Dissociable Effects of Sensory History on Working-Memory Performance

Abstract

AbstractBehavioural reports of sensory information are biased by stimulus history. The nature and direction of such serial-dependence biases can differ between experimental settings – both attractive and repulsive biases towards previous stimuli have been observed. How and when these biases arise in the human brain remains largely unexplored. They could occur either via a change in sensory processing itself, post-perceptual maintenance or decision-making processes, or both. Here, we analysed behavioural and magnetoencephalographic data from a working-memory task in which participants were sequentially presented with two randomly oriented gratings, one of which was cued for recall at the end of the trial. Behavioural responses showed evidence for two distinct biases: 1) a within-trial repulsive bias away from the previously encoded orientation on the same trial, and 2) a between-trial attractive bias towards the task-relevant orientation on the previous trial. Multivariate classification of stimulus orientation revealed that neural representations during stimulus encoding were biased away from the previous grating orientation, regardless of whether we considered the within- or between-trial prior orientation – despite opposite effects on behaviour. These results suggest that repulsive biases occur at the level of sensory processing and can be overturned at post-perceptual stages to result in attractive biases in behaviour.