The detection of colored Glass patterns.

Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland. kristen@ini.phys.ethz.ch

The detection of many chromatic stimuli is mediated by mechanisms that sum their inputs linearly. As a result, these mechanisms have a broad range of selectivity in color space, as do the majority of cells in the early stages of visual processing. In extrastriate cortex, there are cells with a narrow tuning in color space. The function of these cells is not fully understood: they could be involved in color categorization, or could mediate the detection of stimuli such as Glass patterns, whose properties make them undetectable by early stages of processing. We measured the tuning properties of the mechanisms responsible for the detection of colored Glass patterns and found that they have a broad tuning in color space. Our results suggest that Glass patterns are detected by a multitude of mechanisms that sum their inputs linearly.

PMID: 12723965 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]