Stable and continuous perception of objects in the world is impressive given the noisy and constantly changing visual input the brain receives from the retina. Yet, it is still unclear what mechanisms underlie such stable perception. We have previously shown (Fischer, Shankey, and Whitney, VSS, 2011 & Liberman, Fischer, and Whitney, VSS, 2012) that observers experience serial dependence in the perception of orientation as well as object information, an effect that extends up to 15 seconds back in time. Here, we asked whether the purposeful attentional tracking of an object over space can modulate perceptual serial dependence. We presented an oriented Gabor patch that traveled behind an occluder, turned around, and exited out from the same side. Both the Gabor traveling behind the occluder as well as the Gabor exiting out had randomly generated orientations. After the stimulus presentation, subjects adjusted a line’s orientation to match the orientation of the exiting Gabor. We used this response to measure the serial dependence of subjects’ perception between the entering and exiting Gabors. We found that the reported orientation of the exiting Gabor was pulled toward the orientation of the entering Gabor, and that this effect was increased when the subject was able to track the Gabor’s position behind the occluder. This result suggests that serial dependence in orientation perception helps maintain object continuity and identity in the face of discontinuous visibility.

Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013