Data from: The functional role of serial dependence

The world tends to be stable from moment to moment, leading to strong
serial correlations in natural scenes. As similar stimuli usually require
similar behavioral responses, it is highly likely that the brain has
developed strategies to leverage these regularities. A good deal of recent
psychophysical evidence is beginning to show that the brain is sensitive
to serial correlations, causing strong drifts in observer responses
towards previously seen stimuli. However, it is still not clear that this
tendency leads to a functional advantage. Here we test a formal model of
optimal serial dependence and show that as predicted, serial dependence in
an orientation reproduction task is dependent on current stimulus
reliability, with less precise stimuli, such as low spatial frequency
oblique Gabors, exhibiting the strongest effects. We also show that serial
dependence depends on the similarity between two successive stimuli, again
consistent with behavior of an ideal observer aiming at minimizing
reproduction errors. Lastly, we show that serial dependence leads to
faster response times, indicating that the benefits of serial integration
go beyond reproduction error. Overall our data show that serial dependence
has a beneficial role at various levels of perception, consistent with the
idea that the brain exploits temporal redundancy of the visual scene as an
optimization strategy.