Chromatic illumination discrimination ability reveals that human colour constancy is optimised for blue daylight illuminations.

ABSTRACT: The phenomenon of colour constancy in human visual perception keeps surface colours constant, despite changes in their reflected light due to changing illumination. Although colour constancy has evolved under a constrained subset of illuminations, it is unknown whether its underlying mechanisms, thought to involve multiple components from retina to cortex, are optimised for particular environmental variations. Here we demonstrate a new method for investigating colour constancy using illumination matching in real scenes which, unlike previous methods using surface matching and simulated scenes, allows testing of multiple, real illuminations. We use real scenes consisting of solid familiar or unfamiliar objects against uniform or variegated backgrounds and compare discrimination performance

SUBMITTER: Pearce B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3929610 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature