Suprathreshold length summation.

To investigate the mechanisms underlying elongated spatial summation with a pattern-masking paradigm, we measured the contrast detection thresholds for elongated Gabor targets situated at 3° eccentricity to either the left or right of the fixation and elongated along an arc of the same radius to access homogeneous retinal sensitivity. The mask was a ring with a Gabor envelope of the same 3° center radius containing either a concentric (iso-orientation mask) or a radial (orthogonal mask) modulation. The task of the observer was to indicate whether the target in each trial was on the left or the right of the fixation. With orthogonal or low contrast iso-orientation masks, target thresholds first decreased with size with slope -1 on log-log coordinates until the target length reached 45' (specified as the half-height full-width of the Gabor envelope) and then further decreased according to a slope of -1/2, the latter being the signature of an ideal summation process. When the contrast of the iso-orientation mask was sufficiently high, however, the target thresholds, while still showing a -1 slope up to ∼10', asymptoted up to about 50' length, suggesting that the presence of the mask eliminated the ideal summation regime. Beyond about 50', the data approximated another -1 slope decrease in threshold, suggesting the existence of an extra-long channel that is not revealed by the conventional spatial summation paradigm. The full results could be explained by a divisive inhibition model, in which second-order filters sum responses across local oriented channels, combined with a single extra-long filter at least 300' in extent. In this model, the local filter response is given by the linear excitation of the local channels raised to a power, and scaled by divisive inhibition from all channels in the neighborhood. With the high-contrast iso-orientation masks, such divisive inhibition swamps the response to eliminate the ideal summation regime until the stimulus is long enough to activate the extra-long filter.