Abstract
Visual discomfort is related to the statistical regularity of visual images. The contribution of luminance contrast to visual discomfort is well understood and can be framed in terms of a theory of efficient coding of natural stimuli, and linked to metabolic demand. While color is important in our interaction with nature, the effect of color on visual discomfort has received less attention. In this study, we build on the established association between visual discomfort and differences in chromaticity across space. We average the local differences in chromaticity in an image and show that this average is a good predictor of visual discomfort from the image. It accounts for part of the variance left unexplained by variations in luminance. We show that the local chromaticity difference in uncomfortable stimuli is high compared to that typical in natural scenes, except in particular infrequent conditions such as the arrangement of colorful fruits against foliage. Overall, our study discloses a new link between visual ecology and discomfort whereby discomfort arises when adaptive perceptual mechanisms are overstimulated by specific classes of stimuli rarely found in nature.
Highlights
Viewing certain static patterns can result in visual stress, the collective term for a variety of bodily symptoms and perceptual distortions that include discomfort, malaise and nausea, and perceptual instability, hallucinatory colors and shapes (Wilkins, 1995)
We found a significant effect of average chromaticity difference on observers’ judgments of discomfort for both experiments (Set 1, χ2 = 215.72, df = 3, p < 10−15; Set 2, χ2 = 102.68, df = 3, p < 10−15); visual discomfort increased with average chromaticity difference [Set 1, Figure 2A, slope estimate 0.34, 95% ci = (0.25, 0.44); Set 2, Figure 2B, 0.22, ci = (0.15, 0.30)]
We found that chromaticity difference was higher in the visually uncomfortable stimuli than in natural scenes, with only a specific class of natural stimuli, essentially formed of arrangement of ripe fruits against foliage, approaching the values of the color metric associated with the highest discomfort
Summary
Viewing certain static patterns can result in visual stress, the collective term for a variety of bodily symptoms and perceptual distortions that include discomfort, malaise and nausea, and perceptual instability, hallucinatory colors and shapes (Wilkins, 1995). A strong candidate for such a principle is the theory of efficient coding (Barlow, 1961; Simoncelli, 2003) This theory predicts that sensory systems, and the human visual system in particular, have evolved to provide an efficient representation of the stimuli that most commonly appear in natural environments by exploiting their statistical regularities. The theory of efficient coding has received strong empirical support [e.g., see Machens et al (2005)] The association between this theory and visual stress rests on the observation that the patterns that cause visual stress are quite unlike the images that generally occur in nature. Natural scenes, despite their diversity, have particular statistical regularities. The luminance values of nearby locations are highly
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