Chromatic induction and retinal image motion.

As the eyes drift across a scene, borders between surfaces slide across the retina. Consequently, near borders' edges, parts of the retina that have adapted to the light at one side of the border are exposed to the light at the other side of the border. Such changes in exposure might increase the judged contrast. Retinal image motion might therefore contribute to chromatic induction, the influence that adjacent colours have on a surface's apparent colour, by increasing the apparent colour contrast. We conducted two experiments to evaluate this possibility. The experiments examined how artificially increasing or decreasing the extent to which certain surface borders shift across the retina influences the perceived colour. Neither increasing nor decreasing the extent to which selected borders shift across the retina had a substantial influence on the perceived colour. This implies that chromatic induction does not arise from overestimating the contrast between adjacent surfaces when small eye movements shift the border between those surfaces across the retina.