We investigated the effect of adaptation on orientation discrimination using two experienced observers, then replicated the main effects using a total of 50 naïve subjects. Orientation discrimination around vertical improved after adaptation to either horizontal or vertical gratings, but was impaired by adaptation at 7.5 or 15 degrees from vertical. Improvement was greatest when adapter and test were orthogonal. We show that the results can be understood in terms of a functional model of adaptation in cortical vision.
Both psychophysical and neurophysiological evidence suggest that there are two visual cortical processing streams, a linear stream that processes first-order stimuli and a nonlinear stream that also processes second-order stimuli. This evidence also suggests that before the extraction of the second-order signal, the nonlinear pathway broadly but not completely pools signals across initial linear filters that encode the orientation of the carrier of the second-order signal. The evidence suggests that such pooling does not occur across carrier spatial frequencies. We show that similar results are obtained with repulsion tilt illusions but not with attraction effects. Attraction effects exhibit complete orientation crossover (while retaining spatial frequency selectivity), perhaps indicating higher-level processing; an experiment on interocular transfer of the effects supported this conclusion.
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