Perceptual Inferences 2026 · Perception in context: Flexibly integrating long- and short-term history with current input

Eline Van Geert
Workshop on Perceptual Inferences: from philosophy to neuroscience · June 8, 2026 · Rauischholzhausen, Germany

How we perceive visual stimuli does not only depend on aspects of these presented stimuli, but also on the temporal context in which they are presented. In data from a perceptual categorization task with both recognizable and non-recognizable morph series (N = 283), we analyzed the effects of signal strength and response in the previous trial on the response in the current trial. Although categorization was of course stronger for the recognizable morph shapes, attractive and repulsive short-term temporal history effects were only present for the non-recognizable morph sets. This finding suggests that stronger categorization leads to reduced attractive and repulsive context effects, or formulated differently, that short-term context effects only become relevant when long-term categorization is absent. These results are in accordance with an adaptive view on perception, where current sensory information is flexibly integrated with long- and/or short-term context information. I will also discuss planned research on how diverse spatial and temporal context effects combine and interact to shape human perception over time.