Lateral Interactions in Brightness and Color Perception

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In human vision, it is not clear how the visual system maintains the sense of relative brightness under widely varying conditions of lighting. This work exploits an approach using "induction", where a neighboring field affects the perceptual quality of a target field; for example, a gray area next to a dark background looks bright, while the same gray area against a light background looks dark. This illusion works whether the overall illumination is at high or low levels. A novel technique based on this property is used here, where the target is a band and on each side of the band there are both dark and light bars forming a grating, which induce an illusory grating of varying brightness to appear within the band itself, which really has a single constant brightness. Standard matching techniques are used to measure how of dependent the effects are on mechanisms for contrast, and on global (wide-field) vs. local (narrow field) spatial brightness mechanisms. Results from this work will help unravel a fundamental problem in vision, and will have an impact beyond visual neuroscience to perceptual physiology in general, and could be important in the design of visual displays for many applications.