People’s perceptions and their interpretation of the world are known to often be influenced by their expectations and past experiences. One well-established example of this is serial dependence, a bias that prompts humans to make judgments about things that they are perceiving based on other stimuli that they observed shortly beforehand.
Researchers at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, University of Lausanne, CHUV, The Sense Innovation and Research Center, and University of Bergen analyzed the findings of several past studies to better understand how this effect influences decision-making, particularly in situations where humans need to interpret what they are perceiving.
Their findings, published in Nature Human Behavior, suggest that serial dependence typically reduces the accuracy of people’s perceptions, which contradicts previous theories and hypotheses.