Detection of aperiodic test patterns by pattern specific detectors revealed by subthreshold summation

The hypothesis that the visual system detects, under certain conditions, stimulus patterns by means of filters matched to these patterns (Hauske et al. 1976) may be challenged by the argument that other coding mechanisms like spatial frequency channels, Gabor or Hermite filters mimic the behaviour of matched filters, a view supported by the finding of non-linear contrast-interrelationship functions (CIFs), as determined in superposition experiments. In this paper we argue that an overall non-linear CIF does not contradict the hypothesis of detection by a single matched filter: we find that the sensitivity functions determined in our experiments can be separated into two components reflecting (i) a bandpass filter and (ii) a filter characterized by the spectrum of the test-pattern.