Illusory, motion, and luminance-defined contours interact in the human visual system

Psychophysical studies of interactions between contours defined by different image attributes report that luminance-defined and illusory contours show little if any interaction. Because the contours defined by these attributes may vary in perceptual saliency, we employed the tilt aftereffect (TAE) and a cross-adaptation procedure to evaluate interaction effects between luminance-defined and illusory contours under varying saliency conditions as well as to explore the interaction between illusory and motion-defined contours. When contour salience of the adaptation or test stimuli was modified by the addition of various amounts of static noise, we observed a TAE for all combinations of contour types including the novel motion-illusory and illusory-motion pairs. The interactions demonstrated between the contour classes in this as well as other studies suggests contour invariance in the orientation domain.