Abstract
The uninterrupted experience of our visual world seems to be maintained effortlessly and seamlessly by our visual system. One of the mechanisms facilitating this temporal continuity is serial dependence (SD), which makes successive stimuli appear more similar than they really are. The human brain appears to be sensitive to the abundance of serial correlations in visual scenes, inducing strong drifts in observer responses towards previously seen stimuli. SD effects have been studied with a wide variety of stimuli, including orientation and numerosity patches, facial expressions and many more. Cicchini et al. (2018) showed that the prominence of SD depends on the similarity between successive stimuli leading to a two-fold functional advantage by minimizing reproduction errors and yielding faster reaction times. Here, we investigate whether SD effects are evident under realistic conditions by presenting three-dimensional stimuli in immersive virtual reality environments in the near-central (7.5 degrees) and peripheral (30 degrees) visual field (N=20). When the visual sensitivity for stimuli is equalized between the centrally and peripherally presented stimuli, in terms of just-noticeable-difference, SD effects are of equal size and also similar to those observed under typical experimental conditions using simple Gabor patches (10%). The results of this study show that SD effects are evident in immersive environments both in the near-central and peripheral visual field, demonstrating the potential importance of such a mechanism in everyday life.