Division and spreading of attention across color.

Biological systems must allocate limited perceptual resources to relevant elements in their environment. This often requires simultaneous selection of multiple elements from the same feature dimension (e.g. color). To establish the determinants of divided attentional selection of color, we conducted an experiment that used multicolored displays with four overlapping random dot kinematograms that differed only in hue. We manipulated (i) requirement to focus attention to a single color or divide it between two colors; (ii) distances of distractor hues from target hues in a perceptual color space. We conducted a behavioral and an electroencephalographic experiment, in which each color was tagged by a specific flicker frequency and driving its own steady-state visual evoked potential. Behavioral and neural indices of attention showed several major consistencies. Concurrent selection halved the neural signature of target enhancement observed for single targets, consistent with an approximately equal division of limited resources between two hue-selective foci. Distractors interfered with behavioral performance in a context-dependent fashion but their effects were asymmetric, indicating that perceptual distance did not adequately capture attentional distance. These asymmetries point towards an important role of higher-level mechanisms such as categorization and grouping-by-color in determining the efficiency of attentional allocation in complex, multicolored scenes.

Investigating light sensitivity in bipolar disorder (HELIOS-BD).

Many people with bipolar disorder have disrupted circadian rhythms. This means that the timing of sleep and wake activities becomes out-of-sync with the standard 24-hour cycle. Circadian rhythms are strongly influenced by light levels and previous research suggests that people with bipolar disorder might have a heightened sensitivity to light, causing more circadian rhythm disruption, increasing the potential for triggering a mood switch into mania or depression. Lithium has been in clinical use for over 70 years and is acknowledged to be the most effective long-term treatment for bipolar disorder. Lithium has many reported actions in the body but the precise mechanism of action in bipolar disorder remains an active area of research. Central to this project is recent evidence that lithium may work by stabilising circadian rhythms of mood, cognition and rest/activity. Our primary hypothesis is that people with bipolar disorder have some pathophysiological change at the level of the retina which makes them hypersensitive to the visual and non-visual effects of light, and therefore more susceptible to circadian rhythm dysfunction. We additionally hypothesise that the mood-stabilising medication lithium is effective in bipolar disorder because it reduces this hypersensitivity, making individuals less vulnerable to light-induced circadian disruption. We will recruit 180 participants into the HELIOS-BD study. Over an 18-month period, we will assess visual and non-visual responses to light, as well as retinal microstructure, in people with bipolar disorder compared to healthy controls. Further, we will assess whether individuals with bipolar disorder who are being treated with lithium have less pronounced light responses and attenuated retinal changes compared to individuals with bipolar disorder not being treated with lithium. This study represents a comprehensive investigation of visual and non-visual light responses in a large bipolar disorder population, with great translational potential for patient stratification and treatment innovation.

Acquisition of colour categories through learning: Differences between hue and lightness.

Colour categories are acquired through learning, but the nature of this process is not fully understood. Some category distinctions are defined by hue (e.g. red/purple) but other by lightness (red/pink). The aim of this study was to investigate if the acquisition of key information for making accurate cross-boundary discriminations poses different challenges for hue-defined as opposed to lightness-defined boundaries. To answer this question, hue- and lightness-learners were trained on a novel category boundary within the GREEN region of colour space. After training, hue- and lightness-learners as well as untrained controls performed delayed same-different discrimination for lightness and hue pairs. In addition to discrimination data, errors during learning and category-labelling strategies were examined. Errors during learning distributed non-uniformly and in accordance with the Bezold-Brücke effect, which accounts for darker colours at the green-blue boundary appearing greener and lighter colours appearing bluer. Only hue-learners showed discrimination improvements due to category boundary acquisition. Thus, acquisition is more efficient for hue-category compared to lightness-category boundaries. Almost all learners reported using category-labelling strategies, with hue-learners almost exclusively using 'green'/'blue' and lightness learners using a wider range of labels, most often 'light'/'dark'. Thus, labels play an important role in colour category learning and such labelling does not conform to everyday naming: here, the label 'blue' is used for exemplars that would normally be named 'green'. In conclusion, labelling serves the purpose of highlighting key information that differentiates exemplars across the category boundary, and basic colour terms may be particularly effective in facilitating such attentional guidance.

Global enhancement of target color-not proactive suppression-explains attentional deployment during visual search.

The current study touches on a central debate in the area of attention: how the human brain handles distraction by salient stimuli. The idea of proactive suppression proposes a new fundamental perceptual mechanism to resolve this question, whereby attentional capture by a task-irrelevant salient distractor can be preempted through top-down inhibitory mechanisms. In this study, we replicate empirical effects underlying this claim, but show that they are better explained by an alternative mechanism, global target-feature enhancement. Identical to original studies using a capture-probe dual-task design, observers recalled fewer letters superimposed upon color singleton distractors, relative to other irrelevant search items (fillers). However, given that fillers (but not singleton distractors) always matched the color of the target, this effect could have been due to global featural attention to the target color rather than suppression of the singleton distractor. After manipulating the color of fillers such that they no longer matched the target color, probe recall associated with these was reduced, causing the relative "suppression" of singleton distractors to be abolished. We then manipulated the color similarity of targets and fillers, and found that filler probe recall was graded as a function of this color similarity, even within a single search context. This strongly suggests that increased attention to fillers due to global target color enhancement underlies the difference in attention among distractor items, not proactive distractor suppression. In contrast with feature enhancement and reactive suppression, the proposed proactive suppression mechanism still lacks convincing behavioral evidence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Decoding of EEG signals reveals non-uniformities in the neural geometry of colour.

The idea of colour opponency maintains that colour vision arises through the comparison of two chromatic mechanisms, red versus green and yellow versus blue. The four unique hues, red, green, blue, and yellow, are assumed to appear at the null points of these the two chromatic systems. Here we hypothesise that, if unique hues represent a tractable cortical state, they should elicit more robust activity compared to other, non-unique hues. We use a spatiotemporal decoding approach to report that electroencephalographic (EEG) responses carry robust information about the tested isoluminant unique hues within a 100-350 ms window from stimulus onset. Decoding is possible in both passive and active viewing tasks, but is compromised when concurrent high luminance contrast is added to the colour signals. For large hue-differences, the efficiency of hue decoding can be predicted by mutual distance in a nominally uniform perceptual colour space. However, for small perceptual neighbourhoods around unique hues, the encoding space shows pivotal non-uniformities which suggest that anisotropies in neurometric hue-spaces may reflect perceptual unique hues.

Mirror symmetry and aging: The role of stimulus figurality and attention to colour.

Symmetry perception studies have generally used two stimulus types: figural and dot patterns. Here, we designed a novel figural stimulus-a wedge pattern-made of centrally aligned pseudorandomly positioned wedges. To study the effect of pattern figurality and colour on symmetry perception, we compared symmetry detection in multicoloured wedge patterns with nonfigural dot patterns in younger and older adults. Symmetry signal was either segregated or nonsegregated by colour, and the symmetry detection task was performed under two conditions: with or without colour-based attention. In the first experiment, we compared performance for colour-symmetric patterns that varied in the number of wedges (24 vs. 36) and number of colours (2 vs. 3) and found that symmetry detection was facilitated by attention to colour when symmetry and noise signals were segregated by colour. In the second experiment, we compared performance for wedge and dot patterns on a sample of younger and older participants. Effects of attention to colour in segregated stimuli were magnified for wedge compared with dot patterns, with older and younger adults showing different effects of attention to colour on performance. Older adults significantly underperformed on uncued wedge patterns compared with dot patterns, but their performance improved greatly through colour cueing, reaching performance levels similar to young participants. Thus, while confirming the age-related decline in symmetry detection, we found that this deficit could be alleviated in figural multicoloured patterns by attending to the colour that carries the symmetry signal.

Abstracts of Scottish Vision Group 2022 Meeting.

Since it was first launched in 2001, the Scottish Vision Group (SVG) has been a key meeting for vision scientists in Scotland, and has attracted vision scientists from the United Kingdom, Europe and beyond. This small conference is held annually at different places in Scotland. Its friendly atmosphere and stunning Scottish sceneries provide a great environment for relaxed scientific discussions. In particular, it is an excellent opportunity for scientists at an early stage of their career to give a talk about their work. The 2022 edition of SVG was held in St Leonard's Hall at the University of Edinburgh. The meeting started with a panel discussion on camouflage led by Prof Nick Scott-Samuel (University of Bristol), Dr George Lovell (Abertay University) and Dr Rebecca Sharman (Abertay University). Research into camouflage has expanded remarkably over the last decade or so, with interdisciplinarity proving to be a key feature for progress. The discussion focussed on the different types of objectives and research techniques that are prominent in the field. The round table was sponsored by Meta Reality Labs. In the keynote lecture, sponsored by MDPI Vision, Prof Ute Leonards (University of Bristol) discussed the outcomes of her research programme investigating the crosstalk between visual cognition research and locomotion research. The outcomes of this Gibsonian approach do not just provide important insights into active vision but also outline the promising possibilities of sustainable urban design inspired by vision sciences. The rest of the conference was dedicated to talks on a variety of topics, including, but not limited to, attention, eye movements, visual search, motion perception, multisensory perception, colour and 3D vision. We present a selection of these abstracts. An associated Special Issue captures in fuller detail some of the research presented at SVG's 2022 edition.

Luminance Contrast Drives Interactions between Perception and Working Memory.

Visual working memory (WM) enables the use of past sensory experience in guiding behavior. Yet, laboratory tasks commonly evaluate WM in a way that separates it from its sensory bottleneck. To understand how perception interacts with visual memory, we used a delayed shape recognition task to probe how WM may differ for stimuli that bias processing toward different visual pathways. Luminance compared with chromatic signals are more efficient in driving the processing of shapes and may thus also lead to better WM encoding, maintenance, and memory recognition. To evaluate this prediction, we conducted two experiments. In the first psychophysical experiment, we measured contrast thresholds for different WM loads. Luminance contrast was encoded into WM more efficiently than chromatic contrast, even when both sets of stimuli were equated for discriminability. In the second experiment, which also equated stimuli for discriminability, early sensory responses in the EEG that are specific to luminance pathways were modulated by WM load and thus likely reflect the neural substrate of the increased efficiency. Our results cannot be accounted for by simple saliency differences between luminance and color. Rather, they provide evidence for a direct connection between low-level perceptual mechanisms and WM by showing a crucial role of luminance for forming WM representations of shape.

Masking, crowding, and grouping: Connecting low and mid-level vision.

An important task for vision science is to build a unitary framework of low- and mid-level vision. As a step on this way, our study examined differences and commonalities between masking, crowding and grouping-three processes that occur through spatial interactions between neighbouring elements. We measured contrast thresholds as functions of inter-element spacing and eccentricity for Gabor detection, discrimination and contour integration, using a common stimulus grid consisting of nine Gabor elements. From these thresholds, we derived a) the baseline contrast necessary to perform each task and b) the spatial extent over which task performance was stable. This spatial window can be taken as an indicator of field size, where elements that fall within a putative field are readily combined. We found that contrast thresholds were universally modulated by inter-element distance, with a shallower and inverted effect for grouping compared with masking and crowding. Baseline contrasts for detecting stimuli and discriminating their properties were positively linked across the tested retinal locations (parafovea and near periphery), whereas those for integrating elements and discriminating their properties were negatively linked. Meanwhile, masking and crowding spatial windows remained uncorrelated across eccentricity, although they were correlated across participants. This suggests that the computation performed by each type of visual field operates over different distances that co-varies across observers, but not across retinal locations. Contrast-processing units may thus lie at the core of the shared idiosyncrasies across tasks reported in many previous studies, despite the fundamental differences in the extent of their spatial windows.

Emergence of crowding: The role of contrast and orientation salience.

Crowding causes difficulties in judging attributes of an object surrounded by other objects. We investigated crowding for stimuli that isolated either S-cone or luminance mechanisms or combined them. By targeting different retinogeniculate mechanisms with contrast-matched stimuli, we aim to determine the earliest site at which crowding emerges. Discrimination was measured in an orientation judgment task where Gabor targets were presented parafoveally among flankers. In the first experiment, we assessed flanked and unflanked orientation discrimination thresholds for pure S-cone and achromatic stimuli and their combinations. In the second experiment, to capture individual differences, we measured unflanked detection and orientation sensitivity, along with performance under flanker interference for stimuli containing luminance only or combined with S-cone contrast. We confirmed that orientation sensitivity was lower for unflanked S-cone stimuli. When flanked, the pattern of results for S-cone stimuli was the same as for achromatic stimuli with comparable (i.e. low) contrast levels. We also found that flanker interference exhibited a genuine signature of crowding only when orientation discrimination threshold was reliably surpassed. Crowding, therefore, emerges at a stage that operates on signals representing task-relevant featural (here, orientation) information. Because luminance and S-cone mechanisms have very different spatial tuning properties, it is most parsimonious to conclude that crowding takes place at a neural processing stage after they have been combined.

Salience of spatiochromatic patterns.

We investigated the dependence of perceived contrast on cone-opponent stimulus content and its spatial distribution. Participants matched a comparison patch to a light gray standard of fixed contrast. The first experiment determined the point of iso-salience for gratings, Gabors and Gaussians along cardinal directions in cone-opponent color space for two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) and adjustment tasks. No difference was found between adjustment and 2AFC tasks, meaning that adjustment tasks provide a quick and robust way to measure perceived contrast, at least for relatively large suprathreshold stimuli. In line with the differences in contrast energy between Gaussians, Gabors, and gratings, Gaussians required less contrast to achieve equal perceived salience with a standard irrespective of color. More surprisingly, bluish Gaussians were found to have higher salience than yellowish Gaussians at equal levels of contrast. Although perceived contrast of grating and Gabor patterns likely depends on spatial frequency channels that at 1 cycle-per-degree are not too dissimilarly tuned for color and luminance, for Gaussians the contribution of single-opponent neurons would be greater for color than for luminance. In a follow-up experiment, we found that the bluish/yellowish asymmetry decreased as we reduced the proportion of the lowpass non-flat contrast distribution in the stimulus, with minimal asymmetry for the stimulus with a flat contrast distribution (i.e., uniform patch). Combined, this means that differential engagement of spatial frequency channels, single-opponent and double-opponent neurons impacts on perceived contrast of chromatic suprathreshold stimuli. Perceived contrast thus provides a window into neural computations enacted by low-level cone-opponent mechanisms.

Russian blues reveal the limits of language influencing colour discrimination.

Chromatic stimuli across a boundary of basic colour categories (BCCs; e.g. blue and green) are discriminated faster than colorimetrically equidistant colours within a given category. Russian has two BCCs for blue, sinij 'dark blue' and goluboj 'light blue'. These language-specific BCCs were reported to enable native Russian speakers to discriminate cross-boundary dark and light blues faster than English speakers (Winawer et al., 2007, PNAS, 4, 7780-7785). We re-evaluated this finding in two experiments that employed identical tasks as in the cited study. In Experiment 1, Russian and English speakers categorised colours as sinij/goluboj or dark blue/light blue respectively; this was followed by a colour discrimination task. In Experiment 2, Russian speakers initially performed the discrimination task on sinij/goluboj and goluboj/zelënyj 'green' sets. They then categorised these colours in three frequency contexts with each stimulus presented: (i) an equal number of times (unbiased); more frequent (ii) either sinij or goluboj; (iii) either goluboj or zelënyj. We observed a boundary response speed advantage for goluboj/zelënyj but not for sinij/goluboj. The frequency bias affected only the sinij/goluboj boundary such that in a lighter context, the boundary shifted towards lighter shades, and vice versa. Contrary to previous research, our results show that in Russian, stimulus discrimination at the lightness-defined blue BCC boundary is not reflected in processing speed. The sinij/goluboj boundary did have a sharper categorical transition than the dark blue/light blue boundary, but it was also affected by frequency and order biases, demonstrating that "Russian blues" are less well-structured than previously thought.

Spatio-chromatic contrast sensitivity under mesopic and photopic light levels.

Contrast sensitivity functions (CSFs) characterize the sensitivity of the human visual system at different spatial scales, but little is known as to how contrast sensitivity for achromatic and chromatic stimuli changes from a mesopic to a highly photopic range reflecting outdoor illumination levels. The purpose of our study was to further characterize the CSF by measuring both achromatic and chromatic sensitivities for background luminance levels from 0.02 cd/m2 to 7,000 cd/m2. Stimuli consisted of Gabor patches of different spatial frequencies and angular sizes, varying from 0.125 to 6 cpd, which were displayed on a custom high dynamic range (HDR) display with luminance levels up to 15,000 cd/m2. Contrast sensitivity was measured in three directions in color space, an achromatic direction, an isoluminant "red-green" direction, and an S-cone isolating "yellow-violet" direction, selected to isolate the luminance, L/M-cone opponent, and S-cone opponent pathways, respectively, of the early postreceptoral processing stages. Within each session, observers were fully adapted to the fixed background luminance (0.02, 2, 20, 200, 2,000, or 7,000 cd/m2). Our main finding is that the background luminance has a differential effect on achromatic contrast sensitivity compared to chromatic contrast sensitivity. The achromatic contrast sensitivity increases with higher background luminance up to 200 cd/m2 and then shows a sharp decline when background luminance is increased further. In contrast, the chromatic sensitivity curves do not show a significant sensitivity drop at higher luminance levels. We present a computational luminance-dependent model that predicts the CSF for achromatic and chromatic stimuli of arbitrary size.

Neural differences between chromatic- and luminance-driven attentional salience in visual search.

Previous electroencephalographic research on attentional salience did not fully capture the complexities of low-level vision, which relies on both cone-opponent chromatic and cone-additive luminance mechanisms. We systematically varied color and luminance contrast using a visual search task for a higher contrast target to assess the degree to which the salience-computing attentional mechanisms are constrained by low-level visual inputs. In our first experiment, stimuli were defined by contrast that isolated chromatic or luminance mechanisms. In our second experiment, targets were defined by contrasts that isolated or combined achromatic and chromatic mechanisms. In both experiments, event-related potential waveforms contralateral and ipsilateral to the target were qualitatively different for chromatic- compared to luminance-defined stimuli. The same was true of the difference waves computed from these waveforms, with isoluminant stimuli eliciting a mid-latency posterior contralateral negativity (PCN) component and achromatic stimuli eliciting a complex of multiple components, including an early posterior contralateral positivity followed by a late-latency PCN. Combining color with luminance resulted in waveform and difference wave patterns equivalent to those of achromatic stimuli. When large levels of chromaticity contrast were added to targets with small levels of luminance contrast, PCN latency was speeded. In conclusion, the mechanisms underlying attentional salience are constrained by the low-level inputs they receive. Furthermore, speeded PCN latencies for stimuli that combine color and luminance signals compared to stimuli that contain luminance alone demonstrate that color and luminance channels are integrated during pre-attentive visual processing, before top-down allocation of attention is triggered.

Neural responses to dynamic adaptation reveal the dissociation between the processing of the shape of contours and textures.

Shape-adaptation studies show that surround textures can inhibit the processing of contours. Using event-related potentials (ERP), we examined the time-course of neural processes involved in contour-shape and texture-shape processing following adaptation to contours and textures. Contours were made of Gabor strings whose orientations were either tangential or orthogonal to the contour path, while textures were made of a series of contours arranged in parallel. We focused on two ERP components -P1, related to low-level visual processes and N1, broadly indicative of mid-level vision- and, on ERP difference waves (no-adaptor minus with-adaptor) to isolate the effects of adaptation, which are fundamentally distinct from individual processes driving P1 and N1 components. We found that in the absence of adaptation, the N1 component for contour-tests peaked later and increased in amplitude compared to the N1 for texture-tests. Following adaptation, the ERP difference wave for contour-tests revealed an early and a late component that were differentially affected by the presence of surround texture, but critically not by its orientation. For texture-tests, the early component was of opposite polarity for contours compared to texture adaptors. From the temporal sequence of ERP modulations, we conclude that texture processing begins before contour processing and encompasses the stages of perceptual processing reflected in both the low-level P1 and the mid-level N1 vision-related components. Our study provides novel evidence on the nature of separable and temporally distinct texture and contour processing mechanisms, shown in two difference wave components, that highlights the multi-faceted nature of dynamic adaptation to shape when presented in isolation and in context.

Dressing Up for a BBQ on a Blurry Street: #TheDress Is Not Only Ambiguous in Terms of Illumination But Also in Terms of Scene Content.

Explicit or implicit assumptions about the source of illumination are a key determinant of perceived colours from the image of #TheDress. In addition, previous work showed that the extent of the processing of contextual cues in the image may be reduced in blue and black perceivers. This is a brief report of a questionnaire study which focused on the ambiguity of light direction as well as on the ambiguity of the content of #TheDress photograph itself. We replicated previous reports about the importance of perceived light direction: White and gold perceivers were more likely to report light from the back than sideways light. Descriptions of #TheDress image did not relate to perceived colour or light direction, but there were many erroneous reports and a high level of ambiguity. It is highly likely that the ambiguity of image content feeds into the importance of implicit factors that influence perceived illumination as determinants of dress colour.

Symmetry perception for patterns defined by color and luminance.

Perception of visual symmetry is fast and efficient and relies on both early low-level and late mid- and high-level neural mechanisms. To test for potential influences of early low-level mechanisms on symmetry perception, we used isoluminant, achromatic, and combined (color + luminance) patterns in a psychophysical and an event-related-potential (ERP) experiment. In the psychophysical experiment, pattern contrast was fixed at individual symmetry-discrimination threshold. Participants then judged whether a pattern was symmetric or random. Stimuli at isoluminance were associated with a large bias toward symmetry, achromatic stimuli introduced the opposite bias, and stimuli containing a balance of both color and luminance were perceived without bias. These findings are in line with distinct contrast sensitivity functions for color and luminance, with color providing low-frequency information useful for symmetry detection and luminance providing high-frequency information useful for detection of detail. The subsequent ERP experiment was run at high contrasts to assess processing of symmetry in suprathreshold conditions. Sustained posterior negativity, a symmetry-sensitive ERP component, was observed in all conditions and showed the expected dependence on symmetry. However, interactions between symmetry and contrast type were not observed. In conclusion, while our findings at threshold support models that propose an important contribution of low-level mechanisms to symmetry perception, at suprathreshold these low-level contributions do not persist. Therefore, under everyday viewing conditions, symmetry perception engages a relatively broad cortical network that is not constrained by low-level inputs.

Neural mechanisms of divided feature-selective attention to colour.

Feature-based attentional selection of colour is challenging to investigate due to the multidimensional nature of colour-space. When attending concurrently to features from different feature dimensions (e.g. red and horizontal), the attentional selections of the separate dimensions are largely independent. Therefore, if colour constitutes multiple independent feature dimensions for attentional purposes, concurrently attending to two colours should be effective and independent of the specific configuration of target and distractor colours. Here, observers attended concurrently to two out of four fully overlapping random dot kinematograms of different colours, and the allocation of attention to each colour was assessed separately by recordings of steady-state visual evoked potentials. The magnitude of attention effects depended on colour proximity and was well described by a simple model which suggested that colour space is rescaled in an adaptive manner to achieve attentional selection. In conclusion, different spatially overlaid colours can be attended concurrently with an efficiency that is determined by their configuration in colour space, supporting the idea that (at least in terms of hue) colour acts as a single dimension for attentional purposes.

Cortical summation and attentional modulation of combined chromatic and luminance signals.

Cortical networks that process colour and luminance signals are often studied separately, although colour appearance depends on both colour and luminance. In fact, objects in everyday life are very rarely defined by only colour or only luminance, necessitating an investigation into combined processing of these signals. We used steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) to investigate (1) cortical summation of luminance and chromatic contrast and (2) attentional modulation of neural activity driven by competing stimuli that differ in chromoluminant content. Our stimuli combined fixed amounts of chromatic contrast from either of the two cone-opponent mechanisms (bluish and yellowish; reddish and greenish) with two different levels of positive luminance contrast. Our experiments found evidence of non-linear processing of combined colour and luminance signals, which most likely originates in V1-V3 neurons tuned to both colour and luminance. Differences between luminance contrast of stimuli were found to be a key determinant for the size of feature-based voluntary attentional effects in SSVEPs, with colours of lower contrast than the colour they were presented with receiving the highest level of attentional modulation. Our results indicate that colour and luminance contrast are processed interdependently, both in terms of perception and in terms of attentional selection, with a potential candidate mediating their link being stimulus appearance, which depends on both chromaticity and luminance.