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

Behavioral 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 toward 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 and/or during postperceptual processes such as maintenance or decision-making.

To address this, we tested 20 participants (11 female) and analyzed behavioral and magnetoencephalographic (MEG) 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.

Behavioral 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 toward 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-trial or between-trial prior orientation, despite opposite effects on behavior.

These results suggest that repulsive biases occur at the level of sensory processing and can be overridden at postperceptual stages to result in attractive biases in behavior.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Recent experience biases behavioral reports of sensory information, possibly capitalizing on the temporal regularity in our environment.

It is still unclear at what stage of stimulus processing such serial biases arise.

Here, we recorded behavior and neurophysiological [magnetoencephalographic (MEG)] data to test whether neural activity patterns during early sensory processing show the same biases seen in participants' reports.

In a working-memory task that produced multiple biases in behavior, responses were biased toward previous targets, but away from more recent stimuli.

Neural activity patterns were uniformly biased away from all previously relevant items.

Our results contradict proposals that all serial biases arise at an early sensory processing stage.

Instead, neural activity exhibited mostly adaptation-like responses to recent stimuli.