Visual acuity, luminance sensitivity, contrast sensitivity, and color sensitivity are maximal in the fovea and decrease with
retinal eccentricity. Therefore every scene is perceived by integrating the small, high resolution samples collected by
moving the eyes around. Moreover, when viewing ambiguous figures the fixated position influences the dominance of
the possible percepts. Therefore fixations could serve as a selection mechanism whose function is not confined to finely
resolve the selected detail of the scene. Here this hypothesis is tested in the lightness perception domain. In a first series
of experiments we demonstrated that when observers matched the color of natural objects they based their lightness
judgments on objects’ brightest parts. During this task the observers tended to fixate points with above average
luminance, suggesting a relationship between perception and fixations that we causally proved using a gaze contingent
display in a subsequent experiment. Simulations with rendered physical lighting show that higher values in an object’s
luminance distribution are particularly informative about reflectance. In a second series of experiments we considered a
high level strategy that the visual system uses to segment the visual scene in a layered representation. We demonstrated
that eye movement sampling mediates between the layer segregation and its effects on lightness perception. Together
these studies show that eye fixations are partially responsible for the selection of information from a scene that allows
the visual system to estimate the reflectance of a surface.
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