Investigating orientation adaptation following naturalistic film viewing

Humans display marked changes to their perceptual experience of a stimulus following prolonged or repeated exposure to a preceding stimulus. A well-studied example of such perceptual adaptation is the tilt-aftereffect. Here, prolonged exposure to one orientation leads to a shift in the perception of subsequent orientations. Such a capacity to adapt suggests the tuning of the visual system can change over time in response to our current visual environment. However, it remains unclear to what extent adaptation occurs in response to statistical regularities of features present in naturalistic scenes, such as oriented contrast. We therefore investigated orientation adaptation in response to natural viewing of filtered live-action film stimuli. Within a session, participants freely viewed 45 min of a film which had been filtered to include increased contrast energy within a specified orientation band (0°, 45°, 90°, or 135°; i.e., the adaptor). To measure adaptation effects, the film was intermittently interrupted to have participants perform a simple orientation judgement task. Having participants complete behavioural trials throughout the testing session, including 45 min of total adaptation time, allowed investigation of the accumulation of response biases and changes in such biases over the course of the session. We found very little evidence of adaptation across our conditions. Indeed, in the very few conditions where significant adaptation was observed, these effects were much weaker than those observed under typical tilt-aftereffect paradigms. Further, within a single session, we observed inconsistent development of adaptation effects. The current findings therefore suggest very minimal and, where present, inconsistent effects of adaptation in response to naturalistic viewing conditions. The divergence of our results from those predicted by prior studies using minimalistic studies, and suggests consideration of further barriers to understanding perceptual adaptation as experienced in nature are needed.