Objects and scenes comprise the visible world. Thing perception involves both distinguishing one object from others and connecting different perceptual samples of one object throughout time. Serial dependency, the attraction of the current perception of a visual attribute toward values of that attribute experienced in the recent past, demonstrates such binding.
Global methods such as ensemble perception, which quickly extracts the average feature value of a group of objects, support scene perception. The current study investigated how much the perception of single items in multi-object situations was influenced by past feature values of that object or by the previous average attribute of all objects in the ensemble.
The findings indicated that serial dependency occurs independently on two concurrently present items, that ensemble perception is based solely on earlier ensembles, and that serial dependence of an individual object happens exclusively for the properties of that specific object. These findings implied that the temporal integration of successive perceptual data occurs concurrently at distinct levels of visual processing.
Reference: jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2778896
