title: Brightness masking is modulated by disparity structure.
abstract: The luminance contrast at the borders of a surface strongly influences surface's apparent brightness, as demonstrated by a number of classic visual illusions. Such phenomena are compatible with a propagation mechanism believed to spread contrast information from borders to the interior. This process is disrupted by masking, where the perceived brightness of a target is reduced by the brief presentation of a mask (Paradiso & Nakayama, 1991), but the exact visual stage that this happens remains unclear. In the present study, we examined whether brightness masking occurs at a monocular-, or a binocular-level of the visual hierarchy. We used backward masking, whereby a briefly presented target stimulus is disrupted by a mask coming soon afterwards, to show that brightness masking is affected by binocular stages of the visual processing. We manipulated the 3-D configurations (slant direction) of the target and mask and measured the differential disruption that masking causes on brightness estimation. We found that the masking effect was weaker when stimuli had a different slant. We suggest that brightness masking is partly mediated by mid-level neuronal mechanisms, at a stage where binocular disparity edge structure has been extracted.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK; Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK.
authors.forename: Vassilis
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Pelekanos
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK; Center for Information and Neural Networks, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Osaka, Japan; Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan.
authors.forename: Hiroshi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Ban
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK; Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK. Electronic address: aew69@cam.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Andrew E
authors.initials: AE
authors.lastname: Welchman
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D015350:Contrast Sensitivity / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008029:Lighting; D008297:Male; D009903:Optical Illusions / Q000502:physiology; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011601:Psychophysics; D012684:Sensory Thresholds / Q000502:physiology; D015357:Vision Disparity / Q000502:physiology*; D015348:Vision, Binocular / Q000502:physiology; D015349:Vision, Monocular / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Binocular depth perception; Brightness estimation; Filling-in; Visual masking
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