Can Color and Motion Information Be Used to Disentangle the Influence of Multiple Light Sources on Gloss Perception?

Previous results suggest that the glossiness of a surface is systematically underestimated when adjacent highlights from different light sources overlap to such an extent that they appear as a single, expanded highlight. Here we investigated how the availability of color- and motion-induced information, which may help to unravel such merged highlights, affects gloss constancy. We used images of computer-generated scenes where a complex 3D object made of glossy material was illuminated by three point light sources, which had varying distances to each other. The point lights were either all achromatic or they differed clearly in their color and the test object was either presented statically or rotating. The subjects had to adjust the smoothness of a match object illuminated by a single achromatic point light so that it appeared to have the same glossiness as the test object. The results show that color information contributes to gloss constancy in this situation: If it was available, the perceived glossiness remained almost invariant with changes in the degree of overlap between the highlights. This suggests that highlights of different color are processed separately. Motion information had no such effect but only led to a general increase in perceived glossiness.