Spatial-frequency adaptation and grating discrimination: predictions of a line-element model

Recent data have shown that spatial-frequency adaptation has little effect on spatial-frequency discrimination at the adapting frequency, but there is a substantial elevation of discrimination thresholds at frequencies about one octave higher than the adapting frequency. It has also been shown that adaptation produces elevations in grating-orientation discrimination at orientations displaced by +/- 12.0-15.0 deg from the adapting orientation. In this paper, we show that these results agree quantitatively with the predictions (some of which were made without knowledge of the experimental results) of a line-element model for spatial-frequency discrimination. Spatial-frequency bandwidths of the visual mechanisms were previously obtained from masking data. For the orientation-discrimination predictions, the line-element model was generalized to incorporate orientation bandwidths for the spatial mechanisms, again estimated from masking data.