Not too far from last year's favorite: economics

This year on "what I would study if it weren’t cognitive science/experimental psychology": political science

Many thanks to reviewers and everyone else who provided us with their comments and questions. Their friendly feedback guided me through complicated results, and I learned a lot about the details of research during the process. So happy and lucky to be part of this visual perception community!

But more importantly, it offers an example of the details of the experimental design that lead to differences in our results and conclusions. This work aimed to bring together different approaches in the literature with the goal of identifying commonalities and differences among distinct mechanisms.

Serial dependence is the product of adaptive sensory systems that leverage moment-to-moment fluctuations and is reflected in perception and response. Our work supports this claim in manipulating stimulus duration, response frequency, and response type.

The first publication of my PhD is finally here!

Super proud to share this with my supervisor @theresecollins.bsky.social!

doi.org/10.1167/jov....

Okay, this feels a little threatening...

"oh yes, with this experiment, there is only one meaning these results could have"

Please distribute: PhD Position in Visual Perception -- joint opportunity in Iceland and Switzerland #visionscience #cogsci #neuroskyence #psychscisky #phd #academia

Happily graduated from my first VSS meeting with a top finish, but my poorly slept and jetlagged body disagrees...

We only claim that the way you respond to stimulus (or the way the task is designed) seems to matter, as they lead to differences in the ways these effects are exerted (and quite intuitively tbh). Whatever those differences are need future work.

...or they may be the same thing reflected in different ways. But this does not explain why they would show differences as a function of response type.

...previous response in the other direction, as well as repulsion from the previous stimulus. I understand your reluctance to regard these as independent factors, and I am indifferent to that claim. There may be an overarching principle (or a mechanism) that modulates different sources of attractors

Valid point! It is true that the effects may be confounded towards category centers. It is fortunate in our case that we see the effects across all distances to the reference (at similar magnitudes). Noisy stimuli that can be approximated to a category prototype still show attraction towards the...

...stimulus was presented for 50 ms, indicating that they have distinct modulations. However, these explanations do not *solve* the issue. It is still possible that they are confounded, especially with continuous responses. I would be happy to have your input if you know a way around this!

...correlation before our analysis, but we have a posteriori explanations: Responses and stimuli led to opposing effects with categorical responses, suggesting their independence. With continuous responses, it was only the repulsion from the previous stimulus that reached significance when the...

Of course, I love questions that I can answer! Hopefully these will be among them... It is correct that we used a limited range of stimuli (±30-90) for all conditions. Subjects had to compare those orientations to a fixed one when giving categorical responses. We didn't attempt to tackle the high...

Serial dependence is feature-tuned to object categories

PhD candidate Pierre Costa presenting our work at #vss2025

Interested in how response types influence attractive and repulsive history effects? Come see my poster this afternoon at Banyan Breezeway summarizing this manuscript! #VSS2025

www.visionsciences.org/presentation...

It is curious what causes these differences between response types. More on that in the paper 👆

Relative differences between successive events revealed distinct modulations for response types, suggesting that two mechanisms are at play. We also show several conditions which favor attractive or repulsive effects (again, different for each response type).

A diagram illustrating that previous response and stimulus exert the same effects with continuous responses and opposing effects with categorical responses.

We revealed two origins of history effects, from the previous stimulus and response. Whether they exert the same or opposing effects was determined by response type (method of adjustment vs. 2AFC).

Attractive and repulsive history effects in categorical and continuous estimates of orientation perception Perceptual reports can be attracted towards or repulsed from previous stimuli and responses. We investigated the conditions in which attractive and repulsive history effects occur with oriented Gabors...

Happy to share the first manuscript of my PhD (now submitted for review)!

Attractive and repulsive history effects in categorical and continuous estimates of orientation perception
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Had a blast! Thanks to all organizers and participants who made this a memorable experience! 🥰

Which part of the manuscript do you find the hardest to write? Maybe the first paragraph? I like it when my imagination goes wild, making connections to personal experiences, but they always end up irrelevant. How do you manage to keep things interesting and relevant?

How do experiment design and stimulus duration modulate attractive and repulsive history effects? We asked this in a set of experiments and might have found really interesting data. I'd like to get your input too. Come see my poster in the first session tomorrow! #ECVP2024

Hiya! I'm here to tell the stories of my personal and academic life, to think out loud, and to make new connections with like-minded people. For now, I will be crossposting Twitter, but I'm hoping to grow into this platform eventually 🌿