Between repulsion and attraction in serial biases: Replication of Chen and Bae (2024)

What you see depends on what you have seen before, and commonly your perception is drawn toward the past. Such attractive biases, known as serial dependence, are well established for many visual features. Interestingly, Chen and Bae (2024, Cognition) recently reported a repulsive serial bias in a pointing direction estimation task that switched to an attractive one in the presence of a distracting task. At the same time, an analysis of response trajectories revealed a repulsive bias during response execution, irrespective of the condition. These surprising findings prompted us to attempt a replication. We confirmed the main findings of Chen and Bae. However, we also demonstrated that the overall direction and magnitude of the bias are relatively stable for a given observer, regardless of the condition. Furthermore, we found that already the very first moment in the response trajectory differed between conditions, showing a predominantly attractive bias for trials that ended with attraction. The results confirm the robustness of the original findings and pose a challenge for a simple Bayesian model of serial dependence, highlighting the need for computational models that can explain both attractive and repulsive biases.