Color from invisible flicker: a failure of the Talbot-Plateau law caused by an early 'hard' saturating nonlinearity used to partition the human short-wave cone pathway.
The Talbot-Plateau law fails for flicker detected by the short-wavelength-sensitive (S) cones: a 30-40 Hz target, flickering too fast for the flicker to be resolved, looks more yellow than a steady target of the same average intensity. The color change, which is produced by distortion at an early compressive nonlinearity, was used to reveal a slightly bandpass S-cone temporal response before the distortion site and a lowpass response after it. The nonlinearity is probably a 'hard' nonlinearity that arises because the S-cone signal is limited by a response ceiling, which the mean signal level approaches and exceeds as the S-cone adaptation level increases. The nonlinearity precedes the combination of flicker signals from all three cone types.
Stockman
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Department of Psychology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla 92093-0109, USA. astockman@ucsd.edu
Plummer
D J
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D000221:Adaptation, Ocular; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005425:Flicker Fusion / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D017949:Retinal Cone Photoreceptor Cells / Q000502:physiology; D012684:Sensory Thresholds / Q000502:physiology; D013997:Time Factors