Optimizing perception: Attended and ignored stimuli create opposing perceptual biases

Humans have remarkable abilities to construct a stable visual world from continuously changing input. There is increasing evidence that momentary visual input blends with previous input to preserve perceptual continuity. Most studies have shown that such influences can be traced to characteristics of the attended object at a given moment. Little is known about the role of ignored stimuli in creating this continuity. This is important since while some input is selected for processing, other input must be actively ignored for efficient selection of the task-relevant stimuli. We asked whether attended targets and actively ignored distractor stimuli in an odd-one-out search task would bias observers’ perception differently. Our observers searched for an oddly oriented line among distractors and were occasionally asked to report the orientation of the last visual search target they saw in an adjustment task. Our results show that at least two opposite biases from past stimuli influence current perception: A positive bias caused by serial dependence pulls perception of the target toward the previous target features, while a negative bias induced by the to-be-ignored distractor features pushes perception of the target away from the distractor distribution. Our results suggest that to-be-ignored items produce a perceptual bias that acts in parallel with other biases induced by attended items to optimize perception. Our results are the first to demonstrate how actively ignored information facilitates continuity in visual perception.