Designing for Sensory Adaptation: What You See Depends on What You’ve Been Looking at - Recommendations, Guidelines and Standards Should Reflect This

Abstract

Sensory systems continuously recalibrate their responses according to the current stimulus environment. As a result, perception is strongly affected by the current and recent context. These adaptative changes affect both sensitivity (e.g., habituating to noise, seeing better in the dark) and appearance (e.g., how things look, what catches attention) and adjust to many perceptual properties (e.g., from light level to the characteristics of someone's face). They therefore have a profound effect on most perceptual experiences, and on how well the senses work in different settings. Characterizing the properties of adaptation, how it manifests, and when it influences perception in modern environments can provide insights into the diversity of human experience. Adaptation could also be leveraged both to optimize perceptual abilities (e.g., in visual inspection tasks like radiology) and to mitigate unwanted consequences (e.g., exposure to potentially unhealthy stimulus environments).