changing the chevreul illusion by a background luminance ramp lateral inhibition fails at its traditional stronghold - a psychophysical refutation改变chevreul错觉的背景亮度坡道侧抑制失败在其传统的大本营u2014u2014心理物理的驳斥.pdfVIP

Changing the Chevreul Illusion by a Background Luminance Ramp: Lateral Inhibition Fails at Its Traditional Stronghold - A Psychophysical Refutation ´ 1 ´ 2,3 Janos Geier *, Mariann Hudak 1 Stereo Vision Ltd., Budapest, Hungary, 2 Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Cognitive Science, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary, 3 Hungarian Academy of Science-Budapest University of Technology and Economics Research Group of Cognitive Science, Budapest, Hungary Abstract The Chevreul illusion is a well-known 19th century brightness illusion, comprising adjacent homogeneous grey bands of different luminance, which are perceived as inhomogeneous. It is generally explained by lateral inhibition, according to which brighter areas projected to the retina inhibit the sensitivity of neighbouring retinal areas. Lateral inhibition has been considered the foundation-stone of early vision for a century, upon which several computational models of brightness perception are built. One of the last strongholds of lateral inhibition is the Chevreul illusion, which is often illustrated even in current textbooks. Here we prove that lateral inhibition is insufficient to explain the Chevreul illusion. For this aim, we placed the Chevreul staircase in a luminance ramp background, which noticeably changed the illusion. In our psychophysical experiments, all 23 observers reported a strong illusion, when the direction of the ramp was identical to that of the staircase, and all reported homogeneous steps (no illusion) when its direction was the opposite. When the background of the staircase was uniform, 14 saw the illusion, and 9 saw no illusion. To see whether the change of the entire background area or that of the staircase boundary edges were more important, we placed another ramp around the