Serial dependence carries the action that produced the previous report

Previous responses in magnitude-reproduction tasks bias the next judgment across dimensions, with numerosity reports shifting duration and duration reports shifting numerosity.

• Why it matters: Serial dependence is known to pull judgments toward the recent past, but it is unclear whether what carries over is the prior stimulus, the prior decision, or properties of the report/action.
• What they did: Across three magnitude-reproduction experiments, participants reproduced a cued dot-array dimension using a single action that accumulated the display; a response-history model separated previous-stimulus versus previous-response contributions.
• The result: The previous response predicted cross-dimensional attraction even after controlling stimuli, persisted with separate response keys, weakened with task switching, and changed when key-hold mapping was randomized trial by trial.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.