A tilt after-effect for images of buildings: evidence of selectivity for the orientation of everyday scenes

The tilt after-effect (TAE) is thought to be a manifestation of gain control in mechanisms selective for spatial orientation in visual stimuli. It has been demonstrated with luminance-defined stripes, contrast-defined stripes, orientation-defined stripes and even with natural images. Of course, all images can be decomposed into a sum of stripes, so it should not be surprising to find a TAE when adapting and test images contain stripes that differ by 15° or so. We show this latter condition is not necessary for the TAE with natural images: adaptation to slightly tilted and vertically filtered houses produced a ‘repulsive’ bias in the perceived orientation of horizontally filtered houses. These results suggest gain control in mechanisms selective for spatial orientation in natural images.倾斜后效（tilt after-effect, TAE）通常被认为是视觉刺激中空间方位选择性机制产生增益控制的典型表现形式。该效应已在亮度定义条纹、对比度定义条纹、方位定义条纹乃至自然图像中得到实验证实。众所周知，所有图像均可分解为条纹的叠加，因此当适应图像与测试图像中的条纹存在约15°的方位差异时，观测到TAE并不足为奇。我们的研究表明，针对自然图像场景下的TAE而言，这一条件并非必要：对略微倾斜且经过垂直滤波的房屋图像进行适应后，会使被试对经过水平滤波的房屋图像的感知方位产生‘排斥性’偏差。上述结果表明，自然图像中同样存在空间方位选择性机制的增益控制现象。