SORANZO, Alessandro (2010). The luminance misattribution in lightness perception. Psihologija, 43 (1), 33-46.
Abstract
The Simultaneous Lightness Contrast is the condition whereby a grey patch on a dark
background appears lighter than a physically identical patch on a light background. This is
probably the most studied phenomenon in lightness perception. Although this phenomenon
has been explained in terms of low-level mechanisms, convincing evidences supporting a
high-level interpretation have been presented over the last decades. Two are the main highlevel
interpretations. On one side, the layer approach claims that the visual system splits the
luminance into separate overlapping layers, corresponding to separate physical contributions;
whilst on the other side, the framework approach maintains that the visual system groups
the luminance within a set of contiguous frameworks. One of the biggest weaknesses of the
layer approach is that it cannot account properly for errors in lightness perception (Gilchrist,
2005 Current Biology, 15(9), 330–332). To extend the multiple layers interpretation to errors
in lightness perception, in this study we show that the perceptual lightness difference among
equal patches on different backgrounds increases even when the luminance contrast with their
backgrounds shrinks. Specifically, it is shown that the perceptual lightness difference among
equal patches on different backgrounds intensifies when a small-sized semi-transparent
surface is interposed between the patches and the backgrounds. This result indicates that in
these conditions the visual system besides decomposing the luminance into separate layers
also becomes liable for a luminance misattribution. It is proposed that the photometric and
geometric relationships among the luminance edges in the image might account for this
misattribution.
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