Abstract
In his review of the literature Kingdom (2011) noted that “Divided into different camps, each with its own preferred stimuli, methodology and theory, the study of LBT (lightness, brightness, transparency) is sometimes more reminiscent of the social sciences with its deep ideological divides than it is of the neurosciences”. Methodology and theory clearly separate our work from that of Gilchrist as described by Kingdom (2011). The similarity of the underlying problems, however, has led us to investigate the roots of these differences and to propose a framework to bridge the divide and advance the field (Blakeslee & McCourt, 2015). The core ideas of this framework are: 1) that much of the confusion in the literature stems from different groups using different definitions of the central variables (brightness and lightness); 2) that the term lightness, when defined simply as apparent reflectance, is underspecified with regard to illumination and is, due to the inverse problem, often inadvertently used to refer to three very different and independent types of judgments that are not comparable. The theoretical confusions related to these ideas and the false dichotomy between brightness and lightness research paradigms that they support are discussed in relation to the preceding article (Gilchrist, 2015).