Imperceptibly rapid contrast modulations processed in cortex: Evidence from psychophysics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rapid fluctuations in contrast are common in our modern visual environment. They arise, for example, in a room lit by a fluorescent light, when viewing a CRT computer monitor and when watching a movie in a cinema. As we are unconscious of the rapid changes, it has been assumed that they do not affect the operation of our visual systems. By periodically reversing the contrast of a fixed pattern at a rapid rate we render the pattern itself, as well as the modulations, invisible to observers. We show that exposure to these rapidly contrast-modulated patterns alters the way subsequent stationary patterns are processed; patterns similar to the contrast-modulated pattern require more contrast to be detected than dissimilar patterns. We present evidence that the changes are cortically mediated. Taken together, our findings suggest that cortical stages of the visual system respond to the individual frames of a contrast-reversed sequence, even at rates as high as 160 frames per second.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".