Perceptual history biases are predicted by early visual-evoked activity

What we see in the present is affected by what we saw in the recent past. Serial dependence – a bias making a current stimulus to appear more similar to a previous one – has been indeed shown to be ubiquitous in vision. At the neural level, serial dependence is accompanied by a signature of stimulus history (i.e., past stimulus information) emerging from early visual-evoked activity. However, whether this neural signature effectively reflects the behavioural bias is unclear. Here we address this question by assessing the neural (electrophysiological) and behavioural signature of stimulus history across numerosity, duration, and size perception. First, our results show that while the behavioural effect is task-dependent, its neural signature also reflects task-irrelevant dimensions of a past stimulus, suggesting a partial dissociation between the mechanisms mediating the encoding of stimulus history and the behavioural bias itself. Second, we show that performing a task is not a necessary condition to observe the neural signature of stimulus history, but that in the presence of an active task such a signature is significantly amplified. Finally, and more importantly, we show that the pattern of brain activity in a relatively early time window (starting at ~35-65 ms after stimulus onset) significantly predicts the behavioural effect. Overall, our results thus demonstrate that the encoding of past stimulus information in neural signals does indeed reflect serial dependence, and that serial dependence occurs at a relatively early level of visual processing.