Pattern—color separable pathways predict sensitivity to simple colored patterns

Abstract

We have studied how contrast threshold sensitivity depends jointly on pattern and color. We measured sensitivity to colored Gabor patches from 0.5 to 8 c/deg. At each spatial frequency, we measured in many different color directions. We analyze the sensitivity measurements using a series of nested models. We conclude that a model consisting of three pattern-color separable mechanisms predicts detection performance nearly as well as fitting psychometric functions independently. We derive the pattern and color sensitivities of the separable mechanisms from the experimental data. Two derived mechanisms are spatially lowpass and spectrally color-opponent. The third mechanism is spatially bandpass and spectrally broadband.