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Spontaneous recovery of effects of contrast adaptation without awareness

Prolonged exposure to a high contrast stimulus reduces the neural sensitivity to subsequent similar patterns. Recent work has disclosed that contrast adaptation is controlled by multiple mechanisms operating over differing timescales. Adaptation to high contrast for a relatively longer period can be...

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Autores principales: Mei, Gaoxing, Dong, Xue, Dong, Bo, Bao, Min
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4588121/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26483723
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01464
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author Mei, Gaoxing
Dong, Xue
Dong, Bo
Bao, Min
author_facet Mei, Gaoxing
Dong, Xue
Dong, Bo
Bao, Min
author_sort Mei, Gaoxing
collection PubMed
description Prolonged exposure to a high contrast stimulus reduces the neural sensitivity to subsequent similar patterns. Recent work has disclosed that contrast adaptation is controlled by multiple mechanisms operating over differing timescales. Adaptation to high contrast for a relatively longer period can be rapidly eliminated by adaptation to a lower contrast (or meanfield in the present study). Such rapid deadaptation presumably causes a short-term mechanism to signal for a sensitivity increase, canceling ongoing signals from long-term mechanisms. Once deadaptation ends, the short-term mechanism rapidly returns to baseline, and the slowly decaying effects in the long-term mechanisms reemerge, allowing the perceptual aftereffects to recover during continued testing. Although this spontaneous recovery effect is considered strong evidence supporting the multiple mechanisms theory, it remains controversial whether the effect is mainly driven by visual memory established during the initial longer-term adaptation period. To resolve this debate, we used a modified Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) and visual crowding paradigms to render the adapting stimuli invisible, but still observed the spontaneous recovery phenomenon. These results exclude the possibility that spontaneous recovery found in the previous work was merely the consequence of explicit visual memory. Our findings also demonstrate that contrast adaptation, even at the unconscious processing levels, is controlled by multiple mechanisms.
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spelling pubmed-45881212015-10-19 Spontaneous recovery of effects of contrast adaptation without awareness Mei, Gaoxing Dong, Xue Dong, Bo Bao, Min Front Psychol Psychology Prolonged exposure to a high contrast stimulus reduces the neural sensitivity to subsequent similar patterns. Recent work has disclosed that contrast adaptation is controlled by multiple mechanisms operating over differing timescales. Adaptation to high contrast for a relatively longer period can be rapidly eliminated by adaptation to a lower contrast (or meanfield in the present study). Such rapid deadaptation presumably causes a short-term mechanism to signal for a sensitivity increase, canceling ongoing signals from long-term mechanisms. Once deadaptation ends, the short-term mechanism rapidly returns to baseline, and the slowly decaying effects in the long-term mechanisms reemerge, allowing the perceptual aftereffects to recover during continued testing. Although this spontaneous recovery effect is considered strong evidence supporting the multiple mechanisms theory, it remains controversial whether the effect is mainly driven by visual memory established during the initial longer-term adaptation period. To resolve this debate, we used a modified Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) and visual crowding paradigms to render the adapting stimuli invisible, but still observed the spontaneous recovery phenomenon. These results exclude the possibility that spontaneous recovery found in the previous work was merely the consequence of explicit visual memory. Our findings also demonstrate that contrast adaptation, even at the unconscious processing levels, is controlled by multiple mechanisms. Frontiers Media S.A. 2015-09-30 /pmc/articles/PMC4588121/ /pubmed/26483723 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01464 Text en Copyright © 2015 Mei, Dong, Dong and Bao. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Mei, Gaoxing
Dong, Xue
Dong, Bo
Bao, Min
Spontaneous recovery of effects of contrast adaptation without awareness
title Spontaneous recovery of effects of contrast adaptation without awareness
title_full Spontaneous recovery of effects of contrast adaptation without awareness
title_fullStr Spontaneous recovery of effects of contrast adaptation without awareness
title_full_unstemmed Spontaneous recovery of effects of contrast adaptation without awareness
title_short Spontaneous recovery of effects of contrast adaptation without awareness
title_sort spontaneous recovery of effects of contrast adaptation without awareness
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4588121/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26483723
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01464
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