title: How previous experience shapes perception in different sensory modalities.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV, USA.
authors.forename: Joel S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Snyder
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Neural Systems, The Rockefeller University New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Caspar M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Schwiedrzik
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV, USA.
authors.forename: A Davi
authors.initials: AD
authors.lastname: Vitela
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurophysiology, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research Frankfurt, Germany ; Department of Neurological Surgery, Columbia University New York, NY, USA ; Comprehensive Epilepsy Center, Department of Neurology, NYU Langone Medical Center, NYU School of Medicine, New York University New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Lucia
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Melloni
keywords: Bayesian modeling; adaptation; audition; context effects; perceptual memory; vision