How previous experience shapes perception in different sensory modalities

Joel S. Snyder, Caspar M. Schwiedrzik, A. Davi Vitela, Lucia Melloni

What has transpired immediately before has a strong influence on how sensory stimuli are processed and perceived. In particular, temporal context can have contrastive effects, repelling perception away from the interpretation of the context stimulus, and attractive effects (TCEs), whereby perception repeats upon successive presentations of the same stimulus. For decades, scientists have documented contrastive and attractive temporal context effects mostly with simple visual stimuli. But both types of effects also occur in other modalities, e.g., audition and touch, and for stimuli of varying complexity, raising the possibility that context effects reflect general computational principles of sensory systems. Neuroimaging shows that contrastive and attractive context effects arise from neural processes in different areas of the cerebral cortex, suggesting two separate operations with distinct functional roles. Bayesian models can provide a functional account of both context effects, whereby prior experience adjusts sensory systems to optimize perception of future stimuli.