Adaptation and Visual Experience

Like all sensory systems, the visual system continuously recalibrates its sensitivity to match the current visual environment. These adaptation processes adjust not only to simple stimulus features like the average light level, but also for such abstract attributes as the average human face we are exposed to. Thus they profoundly impact every visual experience. Because adaptation adjusts the mind to fit the world, observers adapted to the same environment should tend toward similar percepts even if their visual systems are very different. Conversely, observers exposed to different environments should instead perceive the world differently even if they are physiologically the same. To the extent that we understand the mechanisms of adaptation, it is possible to model them to process images to instead “adapt” the world to fit the observer. Adapting images could allow observers to perceive and act more effectively in novel environments, and provides a method for understanding the benefits and consequences of very long-term adaptation states that are difficult to study by instead adapting the observer.