Chromatic properties of texture-shape and of texture-surround suppression of contour-shape mechanisms

Abstract

Contour-shape coding is color selective (Gheorghiu & Kingdom, 2007a) and surround textures inhibit the processing of contour shapes (Gheorghiu & Kingdom, 2011; Kingdom & Prins, 2009). These two findings raise two questions: (1) is texture-surround suppression of contour shape color selective, and (2) is texture-shape processing color selective? To answer these questions, we measured the shape-frequency aftereffect using contours constructed from strings of Gabors defined along the red-green, blue-yellow, and luminance axes of cardinal color space. The stimuli were either single sinusoidal-shaped contours or textures made of sinusoidal-shaped contours arranged in parallel. We measured aftereffects for (A) single-contour adaptors and single-contour tests defined along the same versus different cardinal directions, (B) texture adaptors and single-contour tests in which the central-adaptor contour/single-contour test and surround adaptor contours were defined along the same versus different cardinal directions, and (C) texture adaptors and texture tests defined along same versus different cardinal directions. We found that color selectivity was most prominent for contour-shape processing, weaker for texture-surround suppression of contour-shape processing, and absent for texture-shape processing.