Rapid Discrimination of McCollough Effects

Abstract

The McCollough effect is a colour aftereffect that is contingent on pattern orientation. Three experiments were conducted to establish whether such aftereffect colours could serve as a basis for discrimination in several rapid discrimination tasks. In the first experiment it was investigated whether aftereffect colours could act like a simple ‘feature’ in a visual search task involving a difficult orientation discrimination. Without McCollough adaptation, the time taken to detect a ‘target’ among ‘distractors’ increased substantially as the number of distractors increased. With adaptation, detection time was essentially independent of the number of distractors, indicating that the nature of the task changed from a difficult orientation discrimination to a simple discrimination based on differences in aftereffect colours. The second and third experiments employed a difficult four-alternative forced-choice procedure in which subjects were required to discriminate a monochromatic patch of square-wave grating oriented at 45° from three others oriented at 135° (and vice versa). The gratings were presented very briefly (67–333 ms) followed by a 500 ms mask. Subjects performed the task with and without McCollough adaptation. Performance was strikingly better after adaptation: colour aftereffects could be used to make the discrimination even at exposure durations as short as 67 ms. The third experiment demonstrated that this enhanced performance was indeed due to perceived colour differences (rather than a possible contrast difference). The results of the three experiments are discussed in relation to proposals about the locus of the McCollough effect.