Adaptation from invisible flicker.

Human ability to resolve temporal variation, or flicker, in the luminance (brightness) or chromaticity (color) of an image declines with increasing frequency and is limited, within the central visual field, to a critical flicker frequency of approximately 50 and 25 Hz, respectively. Much remains unknown about the neural filtering that underlies this frequency-dependent attenuation of flicker sensitivity, most notably the number of filtering stages involved and their neural loci. Here we use the process of flicker adaptation, by which an observer's flicker sensitivity is attenuated after prolonged exposure to flickering lights, as a functional landmark.

Color from invisible patterns.

Human pattern resolution is limited by optical blurring as well as neural filtering by a cascade of retinal and cortical sites with progressively lower resolution limits. Curiously, pattern structure can influence perceived color: a high-contrast, monochromatic (single wavelength) pattern appears desaturated (closer to white) relative to a uniform field of the same wavelength. Here we show that this desaturation is evident even when the pattern's frequency is too high for conscious perception, implicating a nonlinear process--namely light adaptation--at the level of single cone photoreceptors.