Spatial and temporal context effects in visual perception: crowding, serial dependence, and their interaction

Visual perception depends not only on current sensory input but also on its spatial and temporal context. Serial dependence and visual crowding are two well-established phenomena in which perceptual judgments are shaped by recent history and surrounding stimuli, respectively. However, their functional relationship remains unclear.

We examined this using orientation and brightness discrimination tasks in which peripheral targets were presented with flankers varying in colour, orientation, and proximity. Robust crowding and reliable trial-to-trial sequential biases emerged in both tasks, with a similar task–stimulus double dissociation, and the two interacted in feature- and location-specific ways. To resolve how crowding shapes serial dependence, we applied a joint logistic decomposition to the two-alternative forced-choice accuracy data, partialling the previous response from the previous stimulus to recover stimulus- and decision-driven contributions separately.

The sequential biases were carried predominantly by the previous response, but a reliable stimulus-driven residual remained, particularly for orientation judgments, with opposite sign to the decisional component at both locations: at the same location the decisional was attractive and the residual repulsive; for orientation at different locations both components reversed sign, the decisional becoming repulsive and the residual attractive. Current-trial crowding amplified the decisional carry-over in both tasks. Prior-trial crowding additionally shrank both the decisional and stimulus-driven components for orientation, suggesting that crowding acts upstream of the sequential integration mechanism rather than on the integration itself.

Crowding and serial dependence are therefore distinct processes whose interaction is feature-specific and operates through multiple routes: current crowding directly amplifies decisional carry-over; prior crowding both degrades decision reliability and, for orientation only, scales the perceptual representation that sequential integration acts on. These findings recast the link between crowding and serial dependence: rather than parallel manifestations of a single integrative computation, they are dissociable processes whose interaction is asymmetric, feature-specific, and routed through both perceptual and decisional stages. The authors received no specific funding for this work.

School of Psychology, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences, Clinical Developmental Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands The authors declare no competing interests. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

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