A direct neural signature of serial dependence in working memory

Abstract

Serial dependence describes the phenomenon that current object representations are attracted to previously encoded and reported representations. While attractive biases have been observed reliably in behavior, a direct neural correlate has not been established. Previous studies have either shown a reactivation of past information without observing a neural signal related to the bias of the current information, or a repulsive distortion of current neural representations contrasting the behavioral bias. The present study recorded neural signals with magnetoencephalography during a working memory task to identify neural correlates of serial dependence. Participants encoded and memorized two sequentially presented motion directions per trial, one of which was later retro-cued for report. Multivariate analyses provided reliable reconstructions of both motion directions. Importantly, the reconstructed directions in the current trial were attractively shifted towards the target direction of the previous trial. This neural bias mirrored the behavioral attractive bias, thus reflecting a direct neural signature of serial dependence. The use of a retro-cue task in combination with magnetoencephalography allowed us to determine that this neural bias emerged at later, post-encoding time points. This timing suggests that serial dependence in working memory affects memorized information during read-out and reactivation processes that happen after the initial encoding. Impact StatementMagnetoencephalographic recordings revealed a direct neural signature of serial dependence, i.e., an attractive bias of current towards previous representations, which emerged at late, post-encoding stages of processing in working memory.