Quickly fading afterimages: hierarchical adaptations in human perception

Afterimages result from a prolonged exposure to still visual stimuli. They are best detectable when viewed against uniform backgrounds and can persist for multiple seconds. Consequently, the dynamics of afterimages appears to be slow by their very nature. To the contrary, we report here that about 50% of an afterimage intensity can be erased rapidly--within less than a second. The prerequisite is that subjects view a rich visual content to erase the afterimage; fast erasure of afterimages does not occur if subjects view a blank screen. Moreover, we find evidence that fast removal of afterimages is a skill learned with practice as our subjects were always more effective in cleaning up afterimages in later parts of the experiment. These results can be explained by a tri-level hierarchy of adaptive mechanisms, as has been proposed by the theory of practopoiesis.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figure

Context effects in visual length perception: Role of ocular, retinal, and spatial location

In three experiments, we examined the transfer of orientation-contingent context effects between the eyes and across portions of the retina with or without variation in external spatial location. Previous research had shown that vertical lines are judged long, relative to horizontal lines, when the stimulus set comprises relatively long horizontals and short verticals (Contextual Condition B), as compared with the reverse when the stimulus set comprises relatively short horizontals and long verticals (Contextual Condition A). Consequently, the contextual set of stimuli influences the magnitude of the horizontal-vertical illusion (HVI), decreasing its size under Contextual Condition A and increasing its size under Contextual Condition B. Experiment 1 showed that exposing one eye to different stimulus contexts modulated the size of the HVI at the exposed eye but had little or no effect at the other eye. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that the effect of the contextual sets generalized poorly across adjacent portions of the retina but transferred almost perfectly across different locations in external space when the retinal location was constant. Thus, orientation-contingent context effects in visual length perception appear to be specific to the eye and to the region of the retina stimulated, suggesting that these effects reflect relatively early and local changes in sensitivity, rather than relatively late and general shifts in response criteria

A Neural Model of Surface Perception: Lightness, Anchoring, and Filling-in

This article develops a neural model of how the visual system processes natural images under variable illumination conditions to generate surface lightness percepts. Previous models have clarified how the brain can compute the relative contrast of images from variably illuminate scenes. How the brain determines an absolute lightness scale that "anchors" percepts of surface lightness to us the full dynamic range of neurons remains an unsolved problem. Lightness anchoring properties include articulation, insulation, configuration, and are effects. The model quantatively simulates these and other lightness data such as discounting the illuminant, the double brilliant illusion, lightness constancy and contrast, Mondrian contrast constancy, and the Craik-O'Brien-Cornsweet illusion. The model also clarifies the functional significance for lightness perception of anatomical and neurophysiological data, including gain control at retinal photoreceptors, and spatioal contrast adaptation at the negative feedback circuit between the inner segment of photoreceptors and interacting horizontal cells. The model retina can hereby adjust its sensitivity to input intensities ranging from dim moonlight to dazzling sunlight. A later model cortical processing stages, boundary representations gate the filling-in of surface lightness via long-range horizontal connections. Variants of this filling-in mechanism run 100-1000 times faster than diffusion mechanisms of previous biological filling-in models, and shows how filling-in can occur at realistic speeds. A new anchoring mechanism called the Blurred-Highest-Luminance-As-White (BHLAW) rule helps simulate how surface lightness becomes sensitive to the spatial scale of objects in a scene. The model is also able to process natural images under variable lighting conditions.Air Force Office of Scientific Research (F49620-01-1-0397); Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409); Office of Naval Research (N00014-01-1-0624

Configural and perceptual factors influencing the perception of color transparency

The mechanisms by which the brain represents colors are largely unknown. In addition, the large number of color phenomena in the natural world has made understanding color rather difficult. Color transparency perception, which is studied in this thesis, is precisely one of these interesting phenomena: when a surface is seen both in plain view and through a transparent overlay, the visual system still identifies it as a single surface. Processes of the visual system have widely inspired researchers in many domains such as neurosciences, psychology, as well as computer vision. The progress of digital imaging technologies requires research engineers to deal with issues that demand knowledge of human visual processing. To humans, an image is not a random collection of pixels, but a meaningful arrangement of regions and objects. One thus can be inspired by the human visual system to investigate color representation and its applicability to digital image processing. Finding a model of perception is still a challenging matter for researchers among multidisciplinary fields. This thesis discusses the problem of defining an accurate model of transparency perception. Despite the large number of studies on this topic, the underlying mechanisms are still not well understood. Investigating perceptual transparency is challenging due to its interactions with different visual phenomena, but the most intensively studied conditions for perceptual transparency are those involving achromatic luminance and chromatic constraints. Although these models differ in many aspects, a broad distinction can be drawn between models of additive and subtractive transparency. The General Convergence Model (GCM) combines both additive and subtractive color mixtures in showing that systematic chromatic changes in a linear color space, such as translation and convergence (or a combination of both), lead to perceptual transparency. However, while this model seems to be a necessary condition, it is not a sufficient one for transparency perception. A first motivation of this thesis was to evaluate and define situations more general than the GCM. Several chromatic changes consistent or not with the GCM were generated. Additional parameters, such as configural complexity, luminance level, magnitude of the chromatic change and shift direction were tested. The main results showed that observers' responses are influenced by each of the above cited parameters. Convergences appear significantly more transparent when motion is added for bipartite configurations, or when they are generated in a checkerboard configuration. Translations are influenced by both configuration and motion. Shears are described as opaque, except when short vector lengths are combined with motion: the overlay tends to be transparent. Divergences are strongly affected by motion and vector lengths, and rotations by a combination of checkerboard configuration with luminance level and vector length. These results question the generality of the GCM. We also investigated the effects of shadows on the perception of a transparent filter. An attempt to extend these models to handle transparency perception in complex scenes involving surfaces varying in shape and depth, change in conditions of illumination and shadow, is described. A lightness-matching task was performed to evaluate how much constancy is shown by the subject among six experimental conditions, in which shadow position, shadow blur, shadow and filter blending values were varied. The results showed that lightness constancy is very high even if surfaces were seen under both filter and shadow. A systematic deviation from perfect constancy in a manner consistent with a perceived additive shift was also observed. Because the GCM includes additive mixture and is related to color and lightness constancy, these results are promising and may be explained ultimately by this model

Correcciones para la presbicia : implicaciones ópticas, perceptuales y adaptativas

Tesis de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Óptica y Optometría, leída el 18-05-2016Presbyopia is the physiological inability of the crystalline lens to accommodate for objects at near distance. While accommodative lenses are the ideal solutions for presbyopia, current optical solutions rely on providing an acceptable quality of vision at near and far distances. Optimization of the optical solutions rely on better understanding of how the visual system copes with the visual quality produced by the various optical solutions. The aim of this thesis is to study optical, visual and perceptual performance of different presbyopic corrections such as alternating vision, monovision and simultaneous vision, and to study the effect of adaptation on perceptual performances. Methods: We measured and corrected ocular aberrations using custom developed adaptive optics setup, used images blurred by real aberrations of different orientation and/or magnitude and measured the internal code for blur in eyes with long term differences in blur magnitude or orientation using a classification-image like technique. We later used numerically convolved images of different far/near energy and different near additions to study the short term adaptation to pure simultaneous vision using single stimulus detection and scoring tasks...La presbicia es la incapacidad del cristalino para enfocar objetos cercanos. Mientras que las lentes acomodativas son una buena solución para la presbicia, las soluciones más actuales se basan en una corrección aceptable de la visión cercana y lejana simultáneamente. La optimización de estas soluciones pasa por comprender cómo reacciona el sistema a las diferentes correcciones ópticas. El objetivo de esta tesis es el estudio óptico, visual y perceptual de diferentes correcciones a la presbicia como la visión alternante, la mono visión y la visión simultánea, y el estudio del efecto dela adaptación desde el punto de vista perceptual. MétodosSe han medido y corregido las aberraciones oculares mediante un sistema de óptica adaptativa de construcción propia y se han usado imágenes desenfocadas con aberraciones reales con diferentes magnitudes y/u orientaciones para medir el código interno de emborronamiento en los ojos para los diferentes desenfoques y orientaciones mediante métodos de clasificación de imágenes. Posteriormente se han usado imágenes convolucionadas numéricamente con diferentes proporciones en las energías del enfoque cercano o lejano y con diferentes adiciones para estudiar laadaptación a corto plazo en la visión simultánea pura a través de la detección y valoración de estímulos individuales...Fac. de Óptica y OptometríaTRUEunpu

Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 156)

This bibliography lists 170 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in June 1976

Modeling the emergence of perceptual color space in the primary visual cortex

Humans’ perceptual experience of color is very different from what one might expect, given the light reaching the eye. Identical patterns of light are often perceived as different colors, and different patterns of light are often perceived as the same color. Even more strikingly, our perceptual experience is that hues are arranged circularly (with red similar to violet), even though single-wavelength lights giving rise to perceptions of red and violet are at opposite ends of the wavelength spectrum. The goal of this thesis is to understand how perceptual color space arises in the brain, focusing on the arrangement of hue. To do this, we use computational modeling to integrate findings about light, physiology of the visual system, and color representation in the brain. Recent experimental work shows that alongside spatially contiguous orientation preference maps, macaque primary visual cortex (V1) represents color in isolated patches, and within those patches hue appears to be spatially organized according to perceptual color space. We construct a model of the early visual system that develops based on natural input, and we demonstrate that several factors interact to prevent this first model from developing a realistic representation of hue. We show these factors as independent dimensions and relate them to problems the brain must be overcoming in building a representation of perceptual color space: physiological and environmental variabilities to which the brain is relatively insensitive (surprisingly, given the importance of input in driving development). We subsequently show that a model with a certain position on each dimension develops a hue representation matching the range and spatial organization found in macaque V1—the first time a model has done so. We also show that the realistic results are part of a spectrum of possible results, indicating other organizations of color and orientation that could be found in animals, depending on physiological and environmental factors. Finally, by analyzing how the models work, we hypothesize that well-accepted biological mechanisms such as adaptation, typically omitted from models of both luminance and color processing, can allow the models to overcome these variabilities, as the brain does. These results help understand how V1 can develop a stable, consistent representation of color despite variabilities in the underlying physiology and input statistics. This in turn suggests how the brain can build useful, stable representations in general based on visual experience, despite irrelevant variabilities in input and physiology. The resulting models form a platform to investigate various adult color visual phenomena, as well as to predict results of rearing experiments

Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes, supplement 127, April 1974

This special bibliography lists 279 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in March 1974