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An example of the importance of luminance in perception is how it effects our ability to perceive faces. For instance, these are recognizable faces [in middle of lower row], and these aren't [on left end and upper left].

This is from a paper that was presented at last year's Visualization conference, the Which Blair paper by Alan Kalvin and Bernice Rogowitz. Cognitive science and functional imaging can tell us that there are specific parts of the brain that respond to these images and not these, according to how well the pattern of luminance matches what we'd expect to see on an image of a face.

The Which Blair method exploits this property, to provide a fast intuitive way of evaluating a colormap's pattern of luminance variation. Users basically voted on different faces according to how "natural" they looked, and in the process, ended up selecting those colormaps that had monotically increasing luminance.