The functional role of contrast adaptation.

Prolonged inspection of high contrast sinewave gratings increases the contrast required to detect gratings having a similar spatial frequency and orientation. The functional role of such adaptation has, however, in the past, eluded disclosure. We here show that 5 min adaptation to a 2 c/deg sinewave grating of 0.8 contrast changes the observer's ability to discriminate the contrast level of a subsequently presented grating of the same spatial frequency and orientation. Similar to the threshold elevation effect, the observers required more incremental contrast for background contrast levels between 0.1 and 0.4 following adaptation. However, for contrast levels above 0.5, the observers required less delta contrast, following adaptation, to correctly discriminate which of two gratings was incremented in contrast. A simple model for adaptation is proposed to account for the findings which is based on a shift in the semi-saturation constant of the detector's contrast-response function. According to this model, adaptation acts to linearize the underlying mechanism's response in the region near the prevailing contrast level.