Brightness masking is modulated by disparity structure

Pelekanos, Vassilis; Ban, Hiroshi; Welchman, Andrew E.

Abstract

The luminance contrast at the borders of a surface strongly influences surface’s apparent brightness, as demonstrated by a number of classic visual illusions. Such phenomena are compatible with a propagation mechanism believed to spread contrast information from borders to the interior. This process is disrupted by masking, where the perceived brightness of a target is reduced by the brief presentation of a mask (Paradiso & Nakayama, 1991), but the exact visual stage that this happens remains unclear. In the present study, we examined whether brightness masking occurs at a monocular-, or a binocular-level of the visual hierarchy. We used backward masking, whereby a briefly presented target stimulus is disrupted by a mask coming soon afterwards, to show that brightness masking is affected by binocular stages of the visual processing. We manipulated the 3-D configurations (slant direction) of the target and mask and measured the differential disruption that masking causes on brightness estimation. We found that the masking effect was weaker when stimuli had a different slant. We suggest that brightness masking is partly mediated by mid-level neuronal mechanisms, at a stage where binocular disparity edge structure has been extracted.

Citation

Pelekanos, V., Ban, H., & Welchman, A. E. (2015). Brightness masking is modulated by disparity structure. Vision Research, 110(Part A), 87-92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2015.02.010

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 28, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Mar 24, 2019
• Publication Date: 2015-05
• Deposit Date: Nov 6, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 6, 2019
• Journal: Vision Research
• Print ISSN: 0042-6989
• Electronic ISSN: 1878-5646
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 110
• Issue: Part A
• Pages: 87-92
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2015.02.010
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/3068314
• Publisher URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698915000607
• Additional Information: This article is maintained by: Elsevier; Article Title: Brightness masking is modulated by disparity structure; Journal Title: Vision Research; CrossRef DOI link to publisher maintained version: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2015.02.010; Content Type: article; Copyright: Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.