The development and application of audit criteria for assessing knowledge exchange plans in health research grant applications.

Background: Research funders expect evidence of end user engagement and impact plans in research proposals. Drawing upon existing frameworks, we developed audit criteria to help researchers and their institutions assess the knowledge exchange plans of health research proposals.

Findings: Criteria clustered around five themes: problem definition; involvement of research users; public and patient engagement; dissemination and implementation; and planning, management and evaluation of knowledge exchange.

The integration of local chromatic motion signals is sensitive to contrast polarity.

Global motion integration mechanisms can utilize signals defined by purely chromatic information. Is global motion integration sensitive to the polarity of such color signals? To answer this question, we employed isoluminant random dot kinematograms (RDKs) that contain a single chromatic contrast polarity or two different polarities. Single-polarity RDKs consisted of local motion signals with either a positive or a negative S or L-M component, while in the different-polarity RDKs, half the dots had a positive S or L-M component, and the other half had a negative S or L-M component.

Color constancy improves for real 3D objects.

In this study human color constancy was tested for two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) setups with real objects and lights. Four different illuminant changes, a natural selection task and a wide choice of target colors were used. We found that color constancy was better when the target color was learned as a 3D object in a cue-rich 3D scene than in a 2D setup.

Sensitivity to luminance and chromaticity gradients in a complex scene.

Image gradients--smooth changes in color and luminance--may be caused by intrinsic surface reflectance properties or extrinsic illumination phenomena, including shading, shadowing, and inter-reflections. In turn, image gradients may provide the visual system with information concerning the origin of these factors, such as the orientation of surfaces with respect to the light source. Color gradients induced by mutual illumination (MI) may play a similar role to that of luminance gradients in shape-from-shading algorithms; it has been shown that 3D shape perception modulates the influence of MI on surface color perception (M.

Creating physically accurate visual stimuli for free: spectral rendering with RADIANCE.

Visual psychophysicists, who study object, color, and light perception, have a demand for software that produces complex but, at the same time, physically accurate stimuli for their experiments. The number of computer graphic packages that simulate the physical interaction of light and surfaces is limited, and mostly they require the purchase of a license. RADIANCE (Ward, 1994), however, is freely available and popular in the visual perception community, making it a prime candidate.

Reflecting on a room of one reflectance.

We present a numerical analysis of rendered pairs of rooms, in which the spectral power distribution of the illuminant in one room matched the surface reflectance function in the other room, and vice versa. We ask whether distinction between the rooms is possible and on what cues this discrimination is based. Using accurately rendered three-dimensional (3D) scenes, we found that room pairs can be distinguished based on indirect illumination, as suggested by A.

When S-cones contribute to chromatic global motion processing.

There is common consensus now that color-defined motion can be perceived by the human visual system. For global motion integration tasks based on isoluminant random dot kinematograms conflicting evidence exists, whether observers can (Ruppertsberg et al., 2003) or cannot (Bilodeau & Faubert, 1999) extract a common motion direction for stimuli modulated along the isoluminant red-green axis.

Rendering complex scenes for psychophysics using RADIANCE: how accurate can you get?

Rendering packages are used by visual psychophysicists to produce complex stimuli for their experiments, tacitly assuming that the simulation results accurately reflect the light-surface interactions of a real scene. RADIANCE is a physically based, freely available, and commonly used rendering software. We validated the calculation accuracy of this package by comparing simulation results with measurements from real scenes.

The chromatic input to global motion perception.

For over 30 years there has been a controversy over whether color-defined motion can be perceived by the human visual system. Some results suggest that there is no chromatic motion mechanism at all, whereas others do find evidence for a purely chromatic motion mechanism. Here we examine the chromatic input to global motion processing for a range of color directions in the photopic luminance range.