The effect of contrast randomisation on the discrimination of changes in the slopes of the amplitude spectra of natural scenes
Parraga, Carlos Alejandro (University of Cambridge. Department of Physiology)
Tolhurst, David J. (University of Cambridge. Department of Physiology)

Data:	2000
Resum:	It has been suggested (Tadmor and Tolhurst, 1994 Vision Research34 541-554) that the psychophysical task of discriminating changes in the slope of the amplitude spectrum of a complex image may be similar to detecting differences in the degree of blur. It has also been suggested that human observers may perform this discrimination by detecting changes in the effective contrast within single narrow spatial-frequency bands, rather than by detecting changes in the slope per se which would involve the use of contrast information across many different frequency bands. To distinguish between these two possibilities, we have developed an experiment where observers were asked to discriminate changes in the spectral slope while different amounts of random contrast variation were introduced, with the purpose of disrupting their performance. This disruptive effect was designed to be particularly manifest if the observer really was performing a single-frequency-band contrast discrimination but to be unnoticeable if the observer was discriminating the change of slope per se. Our results imply that the observers do not usually detect changes in contrast in just one narrow spatial-frequency band when they discriminate changes in the slope of the amplitude spectrum. Rather, they must compare contrast between bands or, at least, they use contrast information from more than one band. However, for edge-enhanced (whitened) pictures, there is some evidence to suggest that observers rely on contrast changes in only a limited low-spatial-frequency band.
Drets:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, i la comunicació pública de l'obra, sempre que no sigui amb finalitats comercials, i sempre que es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original. No es permet la creació d'obres derivades.
Llengua:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió acceptada per publicar
Matèria:	Vision ; Contrast ; Natural scenes ; Natural images ; Amplitude spectra
Publicat a:	Perception, Vol. 29, Issue 9 (September 2000) , p. 1101-1116, ISSN 1468-4233

DOI: 10.1068/p2904

Postprint 37 p, 727.4 KB

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