Neon Color Spreading: A Review

This paper is about a phenomenon that combines a delicate beauty with a profoundsignificance for understanding visual perception. The neon-like glow of a color that escapesthe boundaries of a real figure and fills the surrounding area until it is halted by theboundaries of an illusory figure has an ethereal quality unlike any other brightness and coloreffect. It also has substantial implications regarding the way in which our visual system usesseemingly incomplete stimuli to generate meaningful percepts, segregate objects from theirbackgrounds, and provide them with color and depth.As it so often happens in science, the effect was discovered and then independentlyrediscovered in the span of a few years. In 1971, Dario Varin of the University of Milanpublished a monograph on Ochromatic contrast and diffusionO whose front cover isreproduced in figure 1. A circular transparent veil can be seen to extend over four sets ofconcentric rings partly composed of blue arcs. It has a subtle bluish tinge and is luminescent,as if it emitted a weak light, or as if it were a colored spot of light cast by some off-screenlamp. This veil is illusory, in the sense that a point-by-point description of the reflectancespectrum of the white background would not reveal any changes corresponding to it.

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