Is the "contour specificity" of McCollough effects an example of anomalous transfer? Comments on Sharpe and Tess (1978)

Color constancy and the functional significance of McCollough effects

A central problem in visual perception concerns how humans perceive stable and uniform object colors despite variable lighting conditions (i.e. color constancy). One solution is to 'discount' variations in lighting across object surfaces by encoding color contrasts, and utilize this information to 'fill in' properties of the entire object surface. Implicit in this solution is the caveat that the color contrasts defining object boundaries must be distinguished from the spurious color fringes that occur naturally along luminance-defined edges in the retinal image (i.e. optical chromatic aberration). In the present paper, we propose that the neural machinery underlying color constancy is complemented by an 'error-correction' procedure which compensates for chromatic aberration, and suggest that error-correction may be linked functionally to the experimentally induced illusory colored aftereffects known as McCollough effects (MEs). To test these proposals, we develop a neural network model which incorporates many of the receptive-field (RF) profiles of neurons in primate color vision. The model is composed of two parallel processing streams which encode complementary sets of stimulus features: one stream encodes color contrasts to facilitate filling-in and color constancy; the other stream selectively encodes (spurious) color fringes at luminance boundaries, and learns to inhibit the filling-in of these colors within the first stream. Computer simulations of the model illustrate how complementary color-spatial interactions between error-correction and filling-in operations (a) facilitate color constancy, (b) reveal functional links between color constancy and the ME, and (c) reconcile previously reported anomalies in the local (edge) and global (spreading) properties of the ME. We discuss the broader implications of these findings by considering the complementary functional roles performed by RFs mediating color-spatial interactions in the primate visual system.

Colour at edges and colour spreading in McCollough effects

Broerse and O'Shea [(1995) Vision Research, 35, 207-226] proposed that the subjective colours in McCollough effects (MEs) consist of two components: edge colours appearing along the edges of contours, and spread colours radiating from edge colours into adjacent uncontoured regions of test patterns. This proposal was examined in five experiments. First, we demonstrated that fine coloured lines located immediately adjacent to the edges of otherwise achromatic square-wave gratings (i.e. colour-fringed gratings) are sufficient to induce MEs comparable in strength to MEs induced with desaturated versions of traditional uniformly-coloured gratings (Experiments 1 & 2). We then quantified edge and spread colours while varying light/dark duty cycles (white-bar width) in gratings with colour-fringed edges (Experiment 3), uniformly-coloured gratings (Experiment 4), and in achromatic gratings tinged with ME colours after adaptation to colour-fringed gratings (Experiment 5). Whereas the perceived magnitude of edge colours remained constant in all cases, spread colours remained constant only for uniformly-coloured gratings. For both MEs and gratings with colour-fringed edges, spread colours decreased as a function of increasing duty cycle, confirming that conventional MEs may be simulated by gratings with colour-fringed edges. We propose that edge colours arise as a consequence of neural operations correcting for the eye's chromatic aberration, while spread colours reveal a neural filling-in process operating to achieve colour constancy. In seeking to implement these suggestions, we present a putative framework based on the receptive-field properties of single cells described in contemporary neurophysiological investigations of colour.

Local and global factors in spatially-contingent coloured aftereffects

Dodwell and O'Shea's [(1987) Vision Research, 27, 569-580] conclusions that contingent coloured aftereffects (CAEs) depend on gobal pattern organization were investigated in four experiments. In Expt 1, we replicated findings that CAEs can be induced with complex patterns (concentric circles; radial spokes) under conditions of systematic eye movements. Contrary to Dodwell and O'Shea's argument that eye movements should uniformly cancel local orientation-colour contingencies, leaving only global effects, we reduced CAE magnitude by halving the diameter of the test stimuli. This suggests that cancellation did not occur uniformly over whole patterns, and that CAEs observed on these patterns are the residuals of uncancelled local orientation-colour contingencies. In Expt 2 we used central-fixation induction procedures to demonstrate that it is possible to induce CAEs with randomly-organized and locally-orthogonal orientation components. These findings are inconsistent with Dodwell and O'Shea's failure to observe CAEs under these conditions, and with their conclusion that global organization is necessary for CAE induction. However, CAEs induced with randomly-organized components were significantly weaker than those induced with globally-organized components. We examined the contribution of global organization in two additional experiments. In Expt 3 we induced CAEs with randomly-organized components under conditions in which the need for central fixation was removed, and found that CAE strength was directly related to the organization as well as the density of local-orientation components. In Expt 4, we found that the global organization of local-orientation components enhanced CAE strength only in regions away from the edges of these components: pattern organization did not affect the strength of CAEs at edges. We interpret these findings as evidence that CAEs may involve separate edge- and spread-colour components, and conclude that such components may account for observations previously attributed to global pattern geometry.

Global factors generate the McCollough effect

It has recently been demonstrated that certain globally orthogonal pattern pairs derived from Hoffman's Lie Transformation Group Model of Neuropsychology (LTG/NP) are sufficient to generate McCollough effects (pattern-contingent colour aftereffects: PCCAES). We now provide evidence that the global factors postulated to generate these particular PCCAEs are also necessary. In Experiment 1 observers made controlled eye movements over the induction patterns and subsequently showed PCCAEs which were as strong as those obtained under central fixation. The induction process therefore did not depend on selectively adapting local oriented and colour-specific edge detectors. The global structure of the inducing patterns appears to be a necessary component of the generation of such aftereffects. In Experiment 2, a number of pattern pairs having various degrees of global organization were used as induction patterns, but in every case there was an equal degree of local orthogonality. Local orthogonality was shown not to be sufficient to induce PCCAEs, but global orthogonality was. These results lend strong support to the notion that McCollough-type PCCAEs are generated in a structure of the visual system somewhat above the level of strictly local operations, whether defined as edge and bar detectors or, equivalently, as units selectively tuned to different spatial frequencies and orientations. The global nature of the effects, and the particular pattern structures involved, lead us to suggest that Hoffman's LTG/NP provides a sound basis for explaining our findings.