A Layered Experience of Lightness and Color
One of the fundamental debates about our experience of lightness and color involves their representational format. Some theories assert that the visual system decomposes the input into a layered representation of separated causes, whereas other theories do not. This chapter presents a variety of phenomena that directly demonstrate that layered image decompositions can play a causal role in our experience of lightness and color and discusses the theoretical implications and unresolved issues that are raised by these effects. The issue of the relationship between transparency and occlusion is discussed, as is relevance of the transparency phenomena to the problem of lightness and color perception more generally, which is an ongoing research problem and unresolved issue.