Chaparro A, Stromeyer C F, Huang E P, Kronauer R E, Eskew R T
Division of Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.
Nature. 1993 Jan 28;361(6410):348-50. doi: 10.1038/361348a0.
It has been argued by Watson, Barlow and Robson that the visual stimulus that humans detect best specifies the spatial-temporal structure of the receptive field of the most sensitive visual neurons. To investigate 'what the eye sees best' they used stimuli that varied in luminance alone. Because the most abundant primate retinal ganglion cells, the P cells, are colour-opponent, we might expect that a coloured pattern would also be detected well. We generalized Watson et al.'s study to include variations in colour as well as luminance. We report here that our best detected coloured stimulus was seen 5-9-fold better than our best luminance spot and 3-8-fold better than Watson's best luminance stimulus. The high sensitivity to colour is consistent with the prevalence and high colour contrast-gain of retinal P cells, and may compensate for the low chromatic contrasts typically found in natural scenes.
沃森、巴洛和罗布森认为，人类最易察觉的视觉刺激精确地指明了最敏感视觉神经元感受野的时空结构。为了探究“眼睛最易看到什么”，他们使用了仅在亮度上有变化的刺激。由于灵长类动物中数量最多的视网膜神经节细胞，即P细胞，是颜色拮抗的，我们可能会预期彩色图案也能被很好地察觉。我们将沃森等人的研究进行了拓展，使其包括颜色以及亮度的变化。我们在此报告，我们最易察觉的彩色刺激比我们最好的亮度光斑清晰5至9倍，比沃森最好的亮度刺激清晰3至8倍。对颜色的高敏感度与视网膜P细胞的普遍存在及高颜色对比度增益相一致，并且可能弥补了自然场景中通常存在的低色度对比度。
