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Wu et al. [Nature 429, 262 (2004)] describe a visual illusion in which color and motion are incorrectly bound: green dots moving downward and red dots moving upward are seen as green dots going up and red dots going down. The present study determined whether S cones contribute to color-motion feature-binding errors, in order to assess the neural representation of color at the level of binding. The specific experimental question is whether binding errors depend on S-cone responses from the objects perceived to have an illusory direction of motion. Alternatively, only L and M cones may determine the neural representation of color that regulates color-motion feature binding. In two experiments, the chromatic difference was manipulated between central objects, which induce color-motion binding errors, and peripheral objects, where color-motion binding errors occur. The chromaticity difference was varied along only the L/M-cone axis or only the S-cone axis. As in Wu et al. [Nature 429, 262 (2004)], color-motion binding was frequently observed in the periphery when there were no central versus peripheral chromatic differences. Further, the results showed that the frequency of color-motion binding errors in the periphery depended on the difference in S-cone excitation between center and periphery, thereby demonstrating that the neural representation of color at the level of feature binding depends on signals from not only L and M cones but also S cones.

Consider a feature of a stimulus (such as color, luminance or spatial frequency) that changes over time along a continuum. When a second stimulus is briefly pulsed with the same feature value as the first stimulus, the two stimuli are not perceived to match. Instead, the continuously changing stimulus is perceived to be farther ahead on the feature continuum than the pulsed stimulus (Sheth, Nijhawan, & Shimojo, Nat. Neurosci., 3, 489, 2000). This shift is quantified by the amount of time ahead on the changing continuum, which is different for various types of features. A basic question is how our percepts are affected when an object has two continuously changing features (such as color and orientation) with different magnitudes of time ahead. This was addressed using a bar continuously changing in both color and orientation. Even though the two features were part of the same object, each feature maintained a distinctly different time ahead. This implies that observers perceived at each moment a combination of color and orientation that never was presented to the eye.

Color matches between two small patches were made in a display containing ten larger regions of different chromaticities. The spatial organization of the ten regions was varied while keeping constant the immediate surround of each patch as well as the space-average chromaticity of the entire stimulus. Different spatial arrangements were designed to alter the perceptual organization inferred by the observer without changing the ensemble of chromaticities actually in view. For example, one arrangement of the ten regions was consistent with five surfaces under two distinct illuminations, with one edge within the display (an “apparent illumination edge”) dividing the stimulus into two areas, one under illuminant A and the other under illuminant C. Another spatial arrangement had the ten regions configured to induce an observer to infer ten surfaces under a single illumination. When the ten regions were arranged with an apparent illumination edge, the patch within the area of illuminant C was perceived as bluer than when the same patch and immediate surround were presented without an apparent illumination edge. The results are accounted for by positing that observers group together regions sharing the same inferred illumination, with a consequent effect on color perception: A fixed patch-within-surround shifts in hue and saturation toward the perceived illumination. We suggest that the change in color perception in a complex scene that results from a difference in real illumination may be caused by the inferred illumination at the perceptual level, not directly by the physical change in the light absorbed by photoreceptors.

Several experiments reveal that judgments of lightness and brightness of an achromatic surface depend, in part, on the luminances of other surfaces perceived to share the same depth plane, even if the surfaces are well separated on the retina. Two Mondrians, simulated on a CRT, were viewed through a haploscope. The more highly illuminated Mondrian contained a comparison patch and appeared nearer than the more dimly illuminated Mondrian, which contained the test patch. By independently varying the disparity of the test patch, observers could make the test patch appear to be in the depth plane of either the dimly or the highly illuminated Mondrian. Observers set the luminance of the test patch to match that of the comparison patch. The test was set as high as 15% more luminous when it was perceived in the depth plane of the highly illuminated rather than the dimly illuminated Mondrian. Both brightness and lightness judgments were affected by the perceived depth of the test, although the lightness judgments of inexperienced observers sometimes were dominated by local-contrast matching.