Global summation of radial frequency patterns and the effect of sudden onset glare on shape discrimination

Global summation of radial frequency patterns and the effect of sudden onset glare on shape discrimination The purpose of this study was to provide evidence of global pooling around the circumference of the Radial frequency (RF) pattern, and to study the effect of sudden onset glare on shape discrimination. The RF stimuli were generated by the amplitude modulation of the radius of a circle which deforms them from circularity, while the cross sectional luminance profile was the fourth derivative of Gaussians (D4). The amplitude of the stimuli determines how distinct the pattern is and thus measures the degree of sensitivity while the radial frequency determines the number of lobes the pattern has. In the first part of the study, whole RF patterns (RF3 to RF16) and open component fractions (0.125, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75), which are incomplete sectors of the whole, were tested against their respective reference unmodulated patterns. Subjects were tasked with discriminating minute deviations from their reference patterns. In the second part of the study, high contrast (20 X detection threshold) RF3 and RF4 contours and equivalent low contrast (5 X detection threshold) RF3 and RF4 contours were used as stimuli. Shape discrimination threshold for the high contrast target was determined with and without sudden onset glare. The result of the first part of the study showed that threshold decreased significantly as larger component RF patterns were tested (p < 0.05). The decrease could not be accounted for by the probabilistic sampling of local filters (probability summation). The result of the second part of the study showed that shape discrimination threshold increased with sudden onset glare. The increase was even more pronounced with lower mean luminance and when smaller fractions of the contours were tested. Shape discrimination threshold was significantly higher with high contrast contours in the presence of glare than equivalent low contrast contours, indicating that the veiling luminance model alone could not account for a decrease in visual performance in this shape discrimination task.