Poster Session II: Luminance and chromaticity discrimination sensitivities following a sudden decrease in background luminance.

Abstract

When we enter a dark place like a tunnel from a bright exterior, our visual sensitivities take some time to adapt to the lower light level. However, there have been few reports about how quickly our sensitivities of luminance and chromaticity discrimination recover in this situation. This study aimed to quantify the time course of discrimination sensitivity for luminance and chromaticity directions after an abrupt decrease in background luminance. In each trial, the background luminance dropped from 100 cd/m² to 1 cd/m². Then, one target and three reference stimuli with different colors were presented under four stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) conditions. The observer was asked to discriminate the target stimulus from the reference stimuli. The results showed that discrimination sensitivity was lowest right after the background luminance change and gradually improved with SOAs. However, sensitivity recovery differed across color directions, with the most improvement in luminance, followed by S, and negligible change in L-M. There was a statistically significant difference between +S and ±(L-M) sensitivities, indicating that the sensitivity recovery after the sudden background luminance change differed between chromaticity directions. Based on the comparison with previous studies, we speculate that both adaptation and masking may contribute to the temporal change of discrimination sensitivities.