3 results
How long range is contour integration in human color vision?
- WILLIAM H.A. BEAUDOT, KATHY T. MULLEN
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- Journal:
- Visual Neuroscience / Volume 20 / Issue 1 / January 2003
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 13 March 2003, pp. 51-64
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We quantified and compared the effect of element spacing on contour integration between the achromatic (Ach), red–green (RG), and blue–yellow (BY) mechanisms. The task requires the linking of orientation across space to detect a contour in a stimulus composed of randomly oriented Gabor elements (1.5 cpd, σ = 0.17 deg), measured using a temporal 2AFC method. A contour of ten elements was pasted into a 10 × 10 cells array, and background elements were randomly positioned within the available cells. The effect of element spacing was investigated by varying the mean interelement distance between two and six times the period of the Gabor elements (λ = 0.66 deg) while the total number of elements was fixed. Contour detection was measured as a function of its curvature for jagged contours and for closed contours. At all curvatures, we found that performance for chromatic mechanisms declines more steeply with the increase in element separation than does performance for the achromatic mechanism. Averaged critical element separations were 4.6 ± 0.7, 3.6 ± 0.4, and 2.9 ± 0.2 deg for Ach, BY, and RG mechanisms, respectively. These results suggest that contour integration by the chromatic mechanisms relies more on short-range interactions in comparison to the achromatic mechanism. In a further experiment, we looked at the combined effect of element size and element separation in contour integration for the Ach mechanism.
Differential distributions of red–green and blue–yellow cone opponency across the visual field
- KATHY T. MULLEN, FREDERICK A.A. KINGDOM
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- Journal:
- Visual Neuroscience / Volume 19 / Issue 1 / January 2002
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 28 June 2002, pp. 109-118
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The color vision of Old World primates and humans uses two cone-opponent systems; one differences the outputs of L and M cones forming a red–green (RG) system, and the other differences S cones with a combination of L and M cones forming a blue–yellow (BY) system. In this paper, we show that in human vision these two systems have a differential distribution across the visual field. Cone contrast sensitivities for sine-wave grating stimuli (smoothly enveloped in space and time) were measured for the two color systems (RG & BY) and the achromatic (Ach) system at a range of eccentricities in the nasal field (0–25 deg). We spatially scaled our stimuli independently for each system (RG, BY, & Ach) in order to activate that system optimally at each eccentricity. This controlled for any differential variations in spatial scale with eccentricity and provided a comparison between the three systems under equivalent conditions. We find that while red–green cone opponency has a steep decline away from the fovea, the loss in blue–yellow cone opponency is more gradual, showing a similar loss to that found for achromatic vision. Thus only red–green opponency, and not blue–yellow opponency, can be considered a foveal specialization of primate vision with an overrepresentation at the fovea. In addition, statistical calculations of the level of chance cone opponency in the two systems indicate that selective S cone connections to postreceptoral neurons are essential to maintain peripheral blue–yellow sensitivity in human vision. In the red–green system, an assumption of cone selectivity is not required to account for losses in peripheral sensitivity. Overall, these results provide behavioral evidence for functionally distinct neuro-architectural origins of the two color systems in human vision, supporting recent physiological results in primates.
Bipolar or rectified chromatic detection mechanisms?
- MARCEL J. SANKERALLI, KATHY T. MULLEN
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- Journal:
- Visual Neuroscience / Volume 18 / Issue 1 / January 2001
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 10 April 2001, pp. 127-135
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It is widely accepted that human color vision is based on two types of cone-opponent mechanism, one differencing L and M cone types (loosely termed “red–green”), and the other differencing S with the L and M cones (loosely termed “blue–yellow”). The traditional view of the early processing of human color vision suggests that each of these cone-opponent mechanisms respond in a bipolar fashion to signal two opponent colors (red vs. green, blue vs. yellow). An alternative possibility is that each cone-opponent response, as well as the luminance response, is rectified, so producing separable signals for each pole (red, green, blue, yellow, light, and dark). In this study, we use psychophysical noise masking to determine whether the rectified model applies to detection by the postreceptoral mechanisms. We measured the contrast-detection thresholds of six test stimuli (red, green, blue, yellow, light, and dark), corresponding to the two poles of each of the three postreceptoral mechanisms. For each test, we determined whether noise presented to the cross pole had the same masking effect as noise presented to the same pole (e.g. comparing masking of luminance increments by luminance decrement noise (cross pole) and luminance increment noise (same pole)). To avoid stimulus cancellation, the test and mask were presented asynchronously in a “sandwich” arrangement (mask-test-mask). For the six test stimuli, we observed that noise masks presented to the cross pole did not raise the detection thresholds of the test, whereas noise presented to the same pole produced a substantial masking. This result suggests that each color signal (red, green, blue, and yellow) and luminance signal (light and dark) is subserved by a separable mechanism. We suggest that the cone-opponent and luminance mechanisms have similar physiological bases, since a functional separation of the processing of cone increments and cone decrements could underlie both the separation of the luminance system into ON and OFF pathways as well as the splitting of the cone-opponent mechanisms into separable color poles.