Hello Elise,
There is a lecture by Psychologist Jeremy Wolfe from MIT about Sensing with a focus on visual issues including the collection of light. If you have iTunes search for Jeremy Wolfe and then find Lecture 4. The podcast is free and the lecture entertaining and informative. Jeremy has a booked called Sensation and Perception (edited by Jeremy and a few other colleagues). It has a section on Dark and Light Adaptation which discusses some of the factors that affective perceived brightness and intensity. The range of sensitivity is really pretty incredible from a small number of photos that can be perceived under complete dark adaptation to the light that ones sees when looking at white sand at mid-day in the desert. Wolfe discusses how the interconnections in the cells of the retina influence perceptions of brightness. My memory is a little weak on that. The sensitivity of the eye is affected by dark adaptation. If I remember correctly from my courses in physiological psychology, sensitive to light increases to a maximum after about 30 minutes in the dark. The sensitivity is related to the regeneration of the pigments in the cones and rods. There is some research showing that light sensitivity during dark adaptation increases more slowly with older adults which might contribute to night vision problems in older adults. The brightness of mono-chromatic light varies with wavelength because the photopigments in the eye have different sensitivities. This causes an effect called the Purkinje effect where different colors at equal light levels will appear to be different in brightness. See the Wikipedia entry which explains it pretty well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purkinje_effect The perception of brightness is influenced by the context -- there are some illusions that illustrate this point where the intensity of a background influences the perception of the intensity of a stimulus embedded in the background. The best sources of information on perception of brightness and the internal and external forces that affect brightness (and a related measure called "lightness") would be general human factors texts. There will be sections on visual mechanisms that control brightness and external factors that influence the perception of brightness. You will find that measures of brightness are related to intensity by a power function. The basic HF texts should be a start for you. I really enjoyed courses on sensation and perception like this which explained why lime green might be a better choice than bright red for fire engines and why certain plants appear brighter or more intense in the twilight hours of the evening (the Purkinje effect). This is a good topic. Chauncey On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 3:09 PM, Elise Edson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello IxDAers! > > My team has received a request from the mechincal engineering team to help > them understand how the human eye perceives relative brightness of light. > Specifically, how sensitive is the human eye to changes in brightness? > > An initial literature search on ACM & Google did not yield results. Can > anyone recommend any articles or other resources, or does anyone know about > related research on this topic? > > Kind regards, > Elise > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
