Neighboring chromaticity influences how white a surface looks.

Neighboring chromaticity influences how white a surface looks. Vision Res. 2019 Oct 14;165:31-35 Authors: Nascimento SMC, Pastilha RC, Brenner E Abstract To identify surface properties independently of the illumination the visual system must make assumptions about the statistics of scenes and their illumination. Are assumptions about the intensity of the illumination independent of assumptions about its chromaticity? To find out, we asked participants to judge whether test patches within three different sets of surrounding surfaces were white or grey. Two sets were matched in terms of their maximal luminance, their mean luminance and chromaticity, and the variability in their luminance and chromaticity, but differed in how luminance and chromaticity were associated: the highest luminance was either associated with colorful surfaces or with achromatic ones. We found that test patches had to have a higher luminance to appear white when the highest luminance in the surrounding was associated with colorful surfaces. This makes sense if one considers that being colorful implies that a surface only reflects part of the light that falls on it, meaning that the illumination must have a higher luminance (a perfectly white surface reflects all of the light falling on it). In the third set, the colorful surfaces had the same luminance as in the set in which they were associated with the highest luminance, but the achromatic surfaces had a lower...
Source: Vision Research - Category: Opthalmology Authors: Tags: Vision Res Source Type: research