IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0069536.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

What Is the Primary Cause of Individual Differences in Contrast Sensitivity?

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel H Baker

Abstract

One of the primary objectives of early visual processing is the detection of luminance variations, often termed image contrast. Normal observers can differ in this ability by at least a factor of 4, yet this variation is typically overlooked, and has never been convincingly explained. This study uses two techniques to investigate the main source of individual variations in contrast sensitivity. First, a noise masking experiment assessed whether differences were due to the observer’s internal noise, or the efficiency with which they extracted information from the stimulus. Second, contrast discrimination functions from 18 previous studies were compared (pairwise, within studies) using a computational model to determine whether differences were due to internal noise or the low level gain properties of contrast transduction. Taken together, the evidence points to differences in contrast gain as being responsible for the majority of individual variation across the normal population. This result is compared with related findings in attention and amblyopia.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel H Baker, 2013. "What Is the Primary Cause of Individual Differences in Contrast Sensitivity?," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(7), pages 1-9, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0069536
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0069536
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0069536
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0069536&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0069536?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Yael Adini & Dov Sagi & Misha Tsodyks, 2002. "Context-enabled learning in the human visual system," Nature, Nature, vol. 415(6873), pages 790-793, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Alex S Baldwin & Daniel H Baker & Robert F Hess, 2016. "What Do Contrast Threshold Equivalent Noise Studies Actually Measure? Noise vs. Nonlinearity in Different Masking Paradigms," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(3), pages 1-25, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.

      More about this item

      Statistics

      Access and download statistics

      Corrections

      All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0069536. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

      If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

      If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

      If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

      For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

      Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

      IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.