Color: An Introduction to Practice and Principles, 3rd Edition

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Color Perception Phenomena

Psychologists have pointed out since the nineteenth century that our experiences of color fall into different categories. What these categories are has been under discussion since that time. Color science distinguishes between unrelated and related colors (to be discussed presently). The likelihood of visual system specialization—in one case concerned with the moment-to-moment operation of the body and in the other one with object identification and availability for contemplation, planning, and pleasure—has been mentioned in Chapter 3. In Western culture there is a tendency, since Aristotle, to regard color as a separate phenomenon that can be analyzed independently of conditions and tied to specific light stimuli. Many experiments have shown, however, that the color experiences we have are the result of the total situation in which they are obtained. The perception of given local stimuli varies if they are taken as induced by a light source or as due to a material. This fact gives rise to a theory that a major perceptual distinction by our visual system is in terms of coding of color as lights or as surfaces (see, e.g., Mausfeld 2003). The change in stimulus required to directly experience a just noticeable difference in brightness of lights is larger than the change required for a just noticeable difference in lightness of two objects. There are countless ...