What you see is so ten seconds ago

In "Serial dependence in visual perception" Jason Fischer and  David Whitney report that what you see now is influenced by what you saw up to ten seconds ago (Nature Neuroscience, 30 March 2014). At first I thought this might be an April fools day joke, but it seems to be a genuine paper in a respected journal. If the findings hold up to independent verification, they might have implications for the design of digital scene creation, video compression and image noise reduction software.

Most video manipulation software works on the assumption the viewer sees a series of still images, working on improving individual frames and on the transition over a few frames. It may be that a better result can be achieved by analysis of the image over a larger number of frames, up to ten seconds. It may be significant that the maximum key frame interval for compression software is eight to ten seconds: same as the maximum length of the effect observed in Fischer and  Whitney's study.