The Rise and Fall of the Recent Past: A Unified Account of Immediate Repetition Paradigms

Perception does not happen instantaneously. Instead, perceptual information is accumulated gradually (i.e., a rise in the perceptual response) to achieve accurate identification despite perceptual noise. This temporal integration of information predicts that previous presentations may become erroneously blended with subsequent presentations. An optimal decision process can reduce this source confusion by discounting perceptual evidence that may have come from previous presentations. Furthermore, habituation (i.e., a fall in the perceptual response) may be the brain's trick for approximating this optimal decision. Habituation reduces blending and enhances change detection: because previous perceptions are habituated, anything new stands out. However, this solution comes with a cost, making it difficult to detect immediate repetitions. Over the last 6 years, my coauthors and I have tested this theory, examining its application to a range of different behavioral tasks that involve immediate repetitions. Here, I review these findings, demonstrating the broad implications of this theory.