The role of scission in the perception of color and opacity

Abstract

Recent work has shown that the decomposition of textures into a layered representation can induce striking percepts of inhomogeneous transparency and modulate the perceived lightness of achromatic textures (B. L. Anderson & J. Winawer, 2005, 2008). It was argued that two photo-geometric principles of perceptual organization were responsible for the percepts that arise in these images: a polarity constraint that determines the relative lightness of the two layers and a transmittance anchoring principle, which is responsible for determining portions of the scene that are in plain view. Here, we show that similar principles of perceptual organization underlie the decomposition of textures that vary only in chromaticity. We show that the chromatic contrast relationships along contours play a critical role in determining when chromatic scission occurs and in determining the perceived color and opacity of the layers that emerge when such conditions prevail. These findings provide evidence that a similar set of computational principles is used to decompose images into layers along both chromatic and achromatic axes of color space.