Luminance texture boundaries and luminance step boundaries are segmented using different mechanisms.

ABSTRACT: In natural scenes, two adjacent surfaces may differ in mean luminance without any sharp change in luminance at their boundary, but rather due to different relative proportions of light and dark regions within each surface. We refer to such boundaries as luminance texture boundaries (LTBs), and in this study we investigate whether LTBs are segmented using different mechanisms than luminance step boundaries (LSBs). We develop a novel method to generate luminance texture boundaries from natural uniform textures, and using these natural LTB stimuli in a boundary segmentation task, we find that observers are much more sensitive to identical luminance differences which are defined by textures (LTBs) than by uniform luminance steps (LSBs), consistent with the possibility of different mechanisms.

SUBMITTER: DiMattina C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8712411 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature