Your view of the world is biased by more than just your own eyes—it's actually influenced by what the people you’re watching are seeing.
March 26, 2026
Original Paper
Beyond self-generated perceptual history: Other’s prior perceptual decisions bias one’s own perceptual decision
PsyArXiv · mracw_v1
AI-generated illustration
The Takeaway
We usually think of our 'perceptual history' as a private, internal process. This study found that when you watch someone else make a decision about what they see (like the orientation of a line), your own brain automatically incorporates their choice into your own visual history, physically altering how you perceive the same stimulus later.
From the abstract
Our perceptual experiences are systematically biased by recent perceptual history, a phenomenon known as serial bias. Yet prior research has focused exclusively on self-generated perceptual history, even though we constantly observe others’ perceptual decisions that could also influence how we see the world. The present study investigated this possibility. In the experiments, pairs of college students (N = 66) alternated trials in an orientation estimation task, with serial bias assessed followi