Von Bezold assimilation effect reverses in stereoscopic conditions

Lightness contrast and lightness assimilation are opposite phenomena: in contrast, grey targets appear darker when bordering bright surfaces (inducers) rather than dark ones; in assimilation, the opposite occurs. The question is: which visual process favours the occurrence of one phenomenon over the other? Researchers provided three answers to this question. The first asserts that both phenomena are caused by peripheral processes; the second attributes their occurrence to central processes; and the third claims that contrast involves central processes, whilst assimilation involves peripheral ones. To test these hypotheses, an experiment on an IT system equipped with goggles for stereo vision was run. Observers were asked to evaluate the lightness of a grey target, and two variables were systematically manipulated: (i) the apparent distance of the inducers; and (ii) brightness of the inducers. The retinal stimulation was kept constant throughout, so that the peripheral processes remained the same. The results show that the lightness of the target depends on both variables. As the retinal stimulation was kept constant, we conclude that central mechanisms are involved in both lightness contrast and lightness assimilation

Comparison and contrast in perceptual categorization

People categorized pairs of perceptual stimuli that varied in both category membership and pairwise similarity. Experiments 1 and 2 showed categorization of 1 color of a pair to be reliably contrasted from that of the other. This similarity-based contrast effect occurred only when the context stimulus was relevant for the categorization of the target (Experiment 3). The effect was not simply owing to perceptual color contrast (Experiment 4), and it extended to pictures from common semantic categories (Experiment 5). Results were consistent with a sign-and-magnitude version of N. Stewart and G. D. A. Brown's (2005) similarity-dissimilarity generalized context model, in which categorization is affected by both similarity to and difference from target categories. The data are also modeled with criterion setting theory (M. Treisman & T. C. Williams, 1984), in which the decision criterion is systematically shifted toward the mean of the current stimuli

Does wage rank affect employees' well-being?

How do workers make wage comparisons? Both an experimental study and an analysis of 16,000 British employees are reported. Satisfaction and well-being levels are shown to depend on more than simple relative pay. They depend upon the ordinal rank of an individual's wage within a comparison group. “Rank” itself thus seems to matter to human beings. Moreover, consistent with psychological theory, quits in a workplace are correlated with pay distribution skewness

On-sky performance of new 90 GHz detectors for the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS)

The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) is a polarization-sensitive telescope array located at an altitude of 5,200 m in the Chilean Atacama Desert and designed to measure the polarized Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) over large angular scales. The CLASS array is currently observing with three telescopes covering four frequency bands: one at 40 GHz (Q); one at 90 GHz (W1); and one dichroic system at 150/220 GHz (HF). During the austral winter of 2022, we upgraded the first 90 GHz telescope (W1) by replacing four of the seven focal plane modules. These new modules contain detector wafers with an updated design, aimed at improving the optical efficiency and detector stability. We present a description of the design changes and measurements of on-sky optical efficiencies derived from observations of Jupiter.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, to appear in the IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2208.0500