Attractive and repulsive visual aftereffects depend on stimulus contrast

Visual perception has been described as a dynamic process where incoming visual information is combined with what has been seen before to form the current percept. Such a process can result in multiple visual aftereffects that can be attractive toward or repulsive away from past visual stimulation. A lot of research has been conducted on what functional role the mechanisms that produce these aftereffects may play. However, there is a lack of understanding of the role of stimulus uncertainty on these aftereffects. In this study, we investigate how the contrast of a stimulus affects the serial aftereffects it induces and how the stimulus itself is affected by these effects depending on its contrast. We presented human observers with a series of Gabor patches and monitored how the perceived orientation of stimuli changed over time with the systematic manipulation of orientation and contrast of presented stimuli. We hypothesized that repulsive serial effects would be stronger for the judgment of high-contrast than low-contrast stimuli, but the other way around for attractive serial effects. Our experimental findings confirm such a strong interaction between contrast and sign of aftereffects. We present a Bayesian model observer that can explain this interaction based on two principles, the dynamic changes of orientation-tuned channels in short timescales and the slow integration of prior information over long timescales. Our findings have strong implications for our understanding of orientation perception and can inspire further work on the identification of its neural mechanisms.