Modeling the dynamics of light adaptation: the merging of two traditions

Light adaptation has been studied using both aperiodic and periodic stimuli. Two well-documented phenomena are described: the background-onset effect (from an aperiodic-stimulus tradition) and high-temporal-frequency linearity (from the periodic-stimulus tradition). These phenomena have been explained within two different theoretical frameworks. Here we briefly review those frameworks. We then show that the models developed to predict the phenomenon from one tradition cannot predict the phenomenon from the other tradition, but that the models from the two traditions can be merged into a class of models that predicts both phenomena.