ArticleJournal of vision2014
Human vision is attuned to the diffuseness of natural light.
Article in Journal of vision, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Orientation fields predict human perception of 3D shape from shading.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Time-of-day perception in paintings.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- From boundaries to bumps: When closed (extremal) contours are critical.Journal of vision · 2021Article
- Distinct processes of lighting priors for lightness and 3-D shape perception.Journal of vision · 2021Article
- A model of lightness perception guided by probabilistic assumptions about lighting and reflectance.Journal of vision · 2020Article
- Effects of light map orientation and shape on the visual perception of canonical materials.Journal of vision · 2020Article
- Hyperspectral environmental illumination maps: characterizing directional spectral variation in natural environments.Optics express · 2019Article
- Evaluation of Material Appearance Under Different Spotlight Distributions Compared to Natural Illumination.Journal of imaging · 2019Article
- Naturally glossy: Gloss perception, illumination statistics, and tone mapping.Journal of vision · 2018Article
- To compute lightness, illumination is not estimated, it is held constant.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2018Article
- Illumination discrimination in the absence of a fixed surface-reflectance layout.Journal of vision · 2018Article
- Discrimination of spectral reflectance under environmental illumination.Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision · 2018Article
- Illumination discrimination in real and simulated scenes.Journal of vision · 2016Article
- The visual light field in real scenes.i-Perception · 2014Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
All images are highly ambiguous, and to perceive 3-D scenes, the human visual system relies on assumptions about what lighting conditions are most probable. Here we show that human observers' assumptions about lighting diffuseness are well matched to the diffuseness of lighting in real-world scenes. We use a novel multidirectional photometer to measure lighting in hundreds of environments, and we find that the diffuseness of natural lighting falls in the same range as previous psychophysical estimates of the visual system's assumptions about diffuseness. We also find that natural lighting is typically directional enough to override human observers' assumption that light comes from above. Furthermore, we find that, although human performance on some tasks is worse in diffuse light, this can be largely accounted for by intrinsic task difficulty. These findings suggest that human vision is attuned to the diffuseness levels of natural lighting conditions.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.