How do we see? A common idea is the eye is like a camera that captures images, but such images are merely an initial step for seeing. Images in the eye change many times each second so if seeing followed directly from a rapid-fire sequence of images then our visual impressions would flit chaotically from one thing to the next each fraction of a second. Instead, we effortlessly experience a stable visual impression of the physical world around us. This stability is created by neural processes of the brain that translate successive images in the eye to steady vision we take for granted. A well-known theory of stability assumes recent prior images are integrated with the current one, thus creating a bias at each moment toward content in prior images. The research proposed here will extend our understanding of neural processes that maintain our stable vision by (1) thoroughly integrating the well-known concept of bias toward previous images (‘serial dependence’) with recent reports of bias away from previous images (‘serial repulsion’) and (2) using a custom-built laboratory apparatus to test whether dependence and repulsion are caused by separate neural mechanisms, each within a distinct part of the human visual system.