Effects of chromatic and luminance contrast on reading
Knoblauch, Arditi and Szlyk measured reading performance for drifting text defined by chromatic and luminance contrast. Adding a small luminance contrast made reading rates unaffected by chromatic contrast across a thirty-fold range of character sizes, and near threshold reading rates approached 300 words per minute. They suggest low-pass filtering affects small characters more and that equiluminant text reading may depend on transients from transverse chromatic aberration. Journal of the Optical Society of America A 8(2), 428, 1991.
Knoblauch, Arditi and Szlyk measured reading performance for drifting text defined by chromatic and luminance contrast. Adding a small luminance contrast made reading rates unaffected by chromatic contrast across a thirty-fold range of character sizes, and near threshold reading rates approached 300 words per minute. They suggest low-pass filtering affects small characters more and that equiluminant text reading may depend on transients from transverse chromatic aberration. Journal of the Optical Society of America A 8(2), 428, 1991.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex record, 2026-11-03; citation details from Crossref.
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doi:10.1364/josaa.8.000428. Read at the level of the abstract.