Lateral Interactions in Brightness and Color Perception

在人类视觉中，尚不清楚视觉系统如何在变化很大的光照条件下保持相对亮度。这项工作利用了一种使用“感应”的方法，即相邻的场影响目标场的感知质量；例如，暗背景旁边的灰色区域看起来很亮，而与亮背景相对的相同的灰色区域看起来很暗。无论整体照明处于高级别还是低级别，此错觉都会起作用。这里使用了一种基于该特性的新技术，其中目标是频带，并且在频带的每一侧都有形成栅格的暗条和亮条，其诱导在真正具有单一恒定亮度的频带本身内出现不同亮度的虚幻栅格。标准匹配技术用于测量效果对对比度机制以及全局(广场)和局部(窄场)空间亮度机制的依赖程度。这项工作的结果将有助于揭开视觉中的一个根本问题，并将产生从视觉神经科学到一般感知生理学的影响，并可能在许多应用的视觉显示器设计中发挥重要作用。

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.