Serial dependence tracks objects and scenes in parallel and independently

The visual world is made up of objects and scenes. Object perception requires both discriminating an individual object from others and binding together different perceptual samples of that object across time. Such binding manifests by serial dependence, the attraction of the current perception of a visual attribute toward values of that attribute seen in the recent past. Scene perception is subserved by global mechanisms such as ensemble perception, the rapid extraction of the average feature value of a group of objects. The current study examined to what extent the perception of single objects in multi-object scenes depended on previous feature values of that object or on the average previous attribute of all objects in the ensemble. Results show that serial dependence occurs independently on two simultaneously present objects, that ensemble perception depends only on previous ensembles, and that serial dependence of an individual object occurs only for the features of that particular object. These results suggest that the temporal integration of successive perceptual samples operates simultaneously at independent levels of visual processing.