Heidi Smith Instructor: Mohamed Jama Biology 1615 Lab July 14, 2011 Article Summary Event-related Potentials

Reveal an Early Advantage for Luminance Contours in the Processing of Objects. Jasna Martinovic, Justyna Mordal, Sophie M. Wuerger, Journal of Vision; 10.1167/11.7.1 After reading this article to my understanding the objective was to detect and identify objects in the visual perception of humans. Your vision operates through continuous processes involving multiple parallel streams; object identification is an extreme efficient and rapid process. Luminance serves as an important role because they allow object representations to enact on an early influence. A low level vision and or separate visual channels process through chromatic and achromatic information. In this study they wanted to understand and identify the time course of luminances special role in object representation. For this study they used 12 healthy subjects, 6 males had normal or corrected to normal vision; provided consent and received a small honorarium to compensate them for their time. The experiments were in a controlled matlab and equipped with a DELL PC. The stimuli were presented on a Mitsubishi 2040u 21 inch CRT monitor, the participants responded by a button box. To describe further chromatic properties they used a DKL-color space. Essentially that means any color is defined by modulations along with three different cardinal axes; which are explained further as three cone classes L, M, and S. To verify the stimuli they were taken from existing line drawings. They used a set of 225 objects for the baseline experiment and 168 objects were selected for the main experiment. The images were then manipulated and became
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unrecognizable in addition the images were also scrambled using the distorting functions of the GIMP software. In the study to adjust it for the observers individual point of isoluminance they used a heterochromatic flicker photometry. With this it displayed between a red and green stimulus. Each observer repeated this selection ten times and the lowest and highest values were eliminated. The procedure was initially a two hour experiment session that was conducted with each observer. The purpose of this baseline experiment was to equate stimulus salience between the different directions in the color space; while based on obtained information of the individual color contrast discrimination thresholds. The participants responses were guided an adaptive quest procedure of the signal contrast; the estimated color contrast threshold came from the relative frequency of a correct response reported. Each participant took part in an EEG experiment lasting about one hour. At this time they were then presented with a single item and made a judgment whether the shown image presented an object or a non object. They continued to record EEG from 32 locations using active Ag-AgCI electrodes placed in an elastic cap. As ERPs they were averaged for purely chromatic and achromatic stimuli, they matched for salience and the full color stimuli. The main experiment was the key behavioral to finding that an object or non-object classification is more accurate when the stimuli contain, in addition to chromatic information then an achromatic component. With this there was also interaction between color directions in accuracy that were only prominent for the objects; however there was no significant difference in the accuracy for the non-object conditions. The reaction time also differed with both the stimuli and the defined different color directions for the objects and non-objects. Also a central-occipital component dominated in the early part of the ERP waveforms. They were the first to reliable and

consistently emerge in the grand-mean waveforms; with no changes in the stimuli containing luminance.