Word.ws English Dictionary

paracontrast

paracontrast noun: a visual phenomenon where the perceived brightness of a stimulus is reduced when it is preceded by an adjacent visual stimulus.

Noun

paracontrast (uncountable)

  1. A visual phenomenon where the perceived brightness of a stimulus is reduced when it is preceded by an adjacent visual stimulus.
    • An apparatus for the demonstration of the phenomena of the time relations of visual stimuli, and of meta- and paracontrast.1918, PHYSIOLOGICAL ABSTRACTS, volume III, THE PHYSIOLOGICAL SOCIETY (GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND), page 557
    • Masking between non-overlapping stimuli is termed paracontrast when the mask precedes the target, and metacontrast then the mask follows the target (equivalent to forward and backward masking between overlapping stimuli).1989, Glyn W. Humphreys, Vicki Bruce, Visual Cognition: Computational, Experimental and Neuropsychological Perspectives, Psychology Press, page 123

Origin of paracontrast

From para- + contrast.

Questions about paracontrast

What does paracontrast mean?
Paracontrast means a visual phenomenon where the perceived brightness of a stimulus is reduced when it is preceded by an adjacent visual stimulus.
What part of speech is paracontrast?
Paracontrast is a noun.

Words near paracontrast in the dictionary

  1. paraconsistent logic
  2. paraconsistent logics
  3. paraconsistentization
  4. paraconsistently
  5. paracontact
  6. paracontrast
  7. paracontrolled
  8. paracontrolled distribution
  9. paracontrolled distributions
  10. paraconule
  11. paraconules

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: paracontrast (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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