Constancy of visual working memory of glossiness under real-world illuminations

Glossiness is a surface property of material that is useful for recognizing objects and spaces. For glossiness to be effective across situations, our visual system must be unaffected by viewing contexts, such as lighting conditions. Although glossiness perception has constancy across changes in illumination, whether visual working memory also realizes glossiness constancy is not known. To address this issue, participants were presented with photo-realistic computer-generated images of spherical objects and asked to match the appearance of reference and test stimuli in relation to two dimensions of glossiness (contrast and sharpness). By comparing performance in terms of the match between perception and memory, we found that both features were well recalled, even when illumination contexts differed between the study and test periods. In addition, no correlation was found between recall errors related to contrast and sharpness, suggesting that these features are independently represented, not only in perception, as previously reported, but also in working memory. Taken together, these findings demonstrate the constancy of glossiness in visual working memory under conditions of real-world illumination.