title: Perceptual fading without retinal adaptation.
abstract: A retinally stabilized object readily undergoes perceptual fading and disappears from consciousness. This startling phenomenon is commonly believed to arise from local bottom-up sensory adaptation to edge information that occurs early in the visual pathway, such as in the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus or retinal ganglion cells. Here we use random dot stereograms to generate perceivable contours or shapes that are not present on the retina and ask whether perceptual fading occurs for such "cortical" contours. Our results show that perceptual fading occurs for "cortical" contours and that the time a contour requires to fade increases as a function of its size, suggesting that retinal adaptation is not necessary for the phenomenon and that perceptual fading may be based in the cortex.
authors.affiliation: Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders Program, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, 8 College Road, Singapore 169857. pojang.hsieh@duke-nus.edu.sg
authors.forename: Po-Jang
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Hsieh
authors.forename: Jaron T
authors.initials: JT
authors.lastname: Colas
mesh_terms: D000221:Adaptation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003867:Depth Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005829:Geniculate Bodies / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011601:Psychophysics; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012160:Retina / Q000502:physiology*; D012165:Retinal Ganglion Cells / Q000502:physiology; D012858:Size Perception / Q000502:physiology; D013788:Thalamus / Q000502:physiology; D015348:Vision, Binocular / Q000502:physiology; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D014795:Visual Pathways / Q000502:physiology