Contributed Session II: Effects of event number and adaptation duration on blur and face aftereffects

Abstract

Previous studies have revealed that the strength of adaptation aftereffects can depend on both the number of adaptation events (trials) and the duration of each event. However, how these effects depend on the stimulus property adapted remains unknown. In the present study, we compared the influence of adaptation event number vs event duration on the strength of adaptation for blur or face aftereffects. For blur adaptation, we filtered a natural image's amplitude spectrum over slopes between -1 (blurred) to +1 (sharpened) relative to the original image to create a series of blurred/sharpened images. For face adaptation, we morphed an Asian and Caucasian face image resulting in a finely graded series of images spanning the two ethnicities. During each top-up adapting period, we varied the number of adaptation events (4 or 16) and duration of each event (250ms or 1s), resulting in 4 event number-event duration conditions. Our results suggest that the effects of event number and event duration on the strength of aftereffects are similar for blur and face adaptation.