Occlusion, transparency, and lightness

Abstract

The lightness of a visual surface is its perceived achromatic reflectance [Adelson, E. H., (2000). Lightness perception and lightness illusions. In M. Gazzaniga (Ed.), The new cognitive neuroscience (2nd ed.) (pp. 339–351) Berlin: Springer; Gilchrist, A. (1999). Lightness perception. In R. W. F. Keil (Ed.), MIT encyclopedia of cognitive science (pp. 471–472). Cambridge: MIT press]. Lightness ranges from black, through various shades of grey, up to white. Anderson and Winawer [Anderson, B., Winawer, J. (2005). Image segmentation and lightness perception. Nature, 434, 79–83] suggested that perceptual decomposition of image luminance into multiple sources in different layers (e.g., perceptual transparency) is critical to the their lightness illusions. However, I show that simple perceptual occlusion evoked by T-junctions will work as well, suggesting that perceptual scission of luminance into multiple layers is unnecessary for such effects. I argue that the lightness illusions presented by Anderson and Winawer involve fundamentally different mechanisms than previously studied lightness illusions, including those involving perceptual transparency.