Fading of Textured Targets on Textured Background

In 1804 Troxler reported that with strict fixation, a small, low-contrast target presented to the peripheral visual field will tend to fade and ultimately become invisible. Further studies have shown that, in addition to stationary targets, moving and flickering targets will also fade. We studied the role of a texture difference between the target and its background on fading. We found that textured targets fade as quickly as, or even faster than, uniform targets. Typically, the target becomes less salient and after a while disappears in the background. Specifically, we asked whether orientation contrast would influence the time of perceptual disappearance. A grating disk of 2 deg diameter and 0.8 cycle deg−1 spatial frequency was presented binocularly on an equally striped background, 15 deg from the fixation point. The orientation of the target relative to that of the background was varied in steps of 15°, yielding eleven stimuli which were presented in a random order. Each orientation was shown a total of nine times. Luminance, spatial frequency, and contrast were the same for both the target and the background. Time to fading was measured for each target orientation. The results show that orientation contrast strongly affects fading. Time to fading was longest when the grating target and the background were oriented at right angles and decreased symmetrically with decreasing orientation contrast. This result supports the hypothesis that fading is an active neuronal process of long-range lateral interactions.