Temporal and spatial effect of postponed lateral inhibition

The experiments on the perceptual contrast of two gratings with the same structure and different qualifications, such that the light and dark slits of one grating flicker simultaneously and the light and dark slits of the other grating flicker alternately, show that within a certain flickering frequency range, the perceptual contrast of the alternately flickering grating is greater than that of the simultaneously flickering one. The fact leads to the conclusion that the lateral inhibition which derives the enhancement of perceptual contrast is out of phase with the input stimulus. And the high-pass filtering properties in both spatial domain and temporal domain for the human vision originate from the same mechanism--the postponed lateral inhibition.© (1992) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.