Nakayama, Shimojo, and Ramachandran's 1990 Paper

The target paper reviewed in this article was titled "Transparency: relation to depth, subjective contours, luminance, and neon colour spreading" coauthored by K Nakayama, S Shimojo, and V S Ramachandran, published in 1990. This paper, one of the first in a series on surface perception, examined how in untextured stereograms, local disparity and luminance contrast can drastically change surface quality, subjective contours, and the effect of neon colour spreading. When we began to conceive this and related work, the ascendant view on visual perception was derived from the pioneering studies of the response properties of visual neurons with microelectrodes, including those of Barlow (1953), Lettvin et al (1959), and Hubel and Wiesel (1959, 1962). All suggested that there are remarkable operations on the image by earliest stages of the visual pathway, which bestowed selectivity to colour, orientation, motion direction, spatial frequency, binocular disparity, etc. As such, it would seem that an understanding of vision would come through more systematic description of the properties of single neuron selectivities. This viewpoint was well summarised by Horace Barlow in his famous neuron doctrine paper (Barlow 1972), which emphasised the importance of analysing the image in successive stages of processing by neurons with specific classes of receptive fields. Later work altered this conception somewhat by seeing receptive fields as linear filters. Rather than detecting the presence of edges, bars, or otherwise perceptually identifiable elements in a scene, cells were seen as making measurements of an image. It was an 'image based' approach to vision, treating the basic operations of vision with no particular regard as to what aspects of scenes were being coded, whether a given cell's response corresponded to something about surfaces, edges, or objects in the real world.