After-image formation by adaptation to dynamic color gradients

The eye’s retinotopic exposure to an adapter typically produces an after-image. For example, an observer who fixates a red adapter on a gray background will see an illusory cyan after-image after removing the adapter. The after-image’s content, like its color or intensity, gives insight into mechanisms responsible for adaptation and processing of a specific feature. To facilitate adaptation, vision scientists traditionally present stable, unchanging adapters for prolonged durations. How adaptation affects perception when features (e.g., color) dynamically change over time is not understood. To investigate adaptation to a dynamically changing feature, participants viewed a colored patch that changed from a color to gray, following either a direct or curved path through the (roughly) equiluminant color plane of CIE LAB space. We varied the speed and curvature of color changes across trials and experiments. Results showed that dynamic adapters produce after-images, vivid enough to be reported by the majority of participants. An after-image consisted of a color complementary to the average of the adapter’s colors with a small bias towards more recent rather than initial adapter colors. The modelling of the reported after-image colors further confirmed that adaptation rapidly instigates and gradually dissipates. A second experiment replicated these results and further showed that the probability of observing an after-image diminishes only slightly when the adapter displays transient (stepwise, abrupt) color transitions. We conclude from the results that the visual system can adapt to dynamic colors, to a degree that is robust to the potential interference of transient changes in adapter content. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13414-022-02570-8.