Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

As the contents of working memory are updated over time, the features of consecutively stored representations are blendedto smooth our visual experience. This phenomenon has been termed serial dependence. The amount of blending that occursbetween representations is tuned as a function of their similarity, and drops off when stimuli are far apart in feature space.Interestingly, when stimuli are very different, their representations in memory are repelled, rather than blended together.This negative effect manifests as peripheral bumps in the tuning curve of serial dependence, when stimuli are at oppositeextremes of feature space. In the present work, we characterize the dependence of the peripheral bumps on the memorydelay period and the inter-trial interval. We present preliminary evidence that the peripheral effect is not strictly tiedto the central, positive effect. Serial dependence may comprise two dissociable mnemonic biases, with distinct neuralmechanisms and functional roles.