A tilt after-effect for images of buildings: Evidence of selectivity for the orientation of everyday scenes

Ismail, A. M. H., Solomon, J. A., Hansard, M. & Mareschal, I. (2016). A tilt after-effect for images of buildings: Evidence of selectivity for the orientation of everyday scenes. Royal Society Open Science, 3(11), 160551. doi: 10.1098/rsos.160551

Abstract

The tilt after-effect (TAE) is thought to be a manifestation of gain control in mechanisms selective for spatial orientation in visual stimuli. It has been demonstrated with luminance-defined stripes, contrast-defined stripes, orientation-defined stripes, and even with natural images. Of course, all images can be decomposed into a sum of stripes, so it should not be surprising to find a TAE when adapting and test images contain stripes that differ by 15° or so. We show this latter condition is not necessary for the TAE with natural images: adaptation to slightly tilted and vertically filtered houses produced a “repulsive” bias in the perceived orientation of horizontally filtered houses. These results suggest gain control in mechanisms selective for spatial orientation in natural images.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2016 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
Publisher Keywords:	natural images, global orientation, tilt after-effect, spatially non-specific
Subjects:	R Medicine > RE Ophthalmology
Departments:	School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Optometry & Visual Sciences