On Wednesday 21st June, Sophie M Wuerger presented a talk, Color Appearance & Cone Signals, at IS&T's Third European Conference on Colour in Graphics, Imaging, and Vision (CGIV) at the University of Leeds. The talk was sponsored by Cambridge Research Systems.

• For a summary of the talk, read through each of the the tabs: Intro, Task, Model, Hue Planes, Variability, above.
• To view the original sildes, and listen to Dr Wuerger's talk, which was recorded live at the CGIV 2006 meeting, click on the image below.

Click here to listen to the talk

The talk is about 20 minutes long. This presentation has been converted into a Flash file and uses streaming technology, so that you can start watching without waiting for the entire file to download. The presentation will open in a new window and run from start to end automatically, or you can use the controls in the bottom right corner to pause and navigate from slide to slide if you prefer. Don't forget to turn on your speakers!

Abstract

What computation does the human brain perform when we experience ‘red’ (or green, or yellow, or blue)? How does the human visual system combine the retinal cone signals (L, M, S cones)  to yield these colour sensations?

To address this question we ask observers to select the colour which appears ‘neither red nor green’ (yielding unique yellow and unique blue) or ‘neither yellow nor blue’ (yielding unique red and unique green). Since we obtain these unique hue settings at different luminance and saturation levels,  we have many points  in 3-dimensional (LMS) cone space  that correspond to a particular hue. This allows us to determine quantitatively how the cone signals are related to a particular perceived hue. Our results show that the human brain combines the (L,M,S) cone signals linearly when we experience these unique hues. Furthermore, the variability between observers is relatively small when expressed in terms of perceptual errors. Our results add further weight to the idea that the colour vision system in adult humans is able to recalibrate itself based on prior visual experience and that our colour appearance mechanisms may be a consequence of environmental constraints.

Author Biography

Sophie Wuerger, pictured left, received her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology at New York University (1991). Since then she has worked on visual perception, in particular colour vision, and is currently at the Centre of Cognitive Neuroscience, School of Psychology, University of Liverpool. She is a member of the Colour Group UK and the Optical Society of America.

Sponsorship

This talk was sponsored by Cambridge Research Systems as part of our on-going support of the Vision Science community. We are able to support a small number of conferences, and are always interested in new opportunities to give assistance to relevant meetings. If you are a conference organiser, and would like to discuss sponsorship, please contact us.

"Many thanks from myself and the organisers of CGIV for your very kind and generous sponsorship of the colour vision session of the meeting. Your help made an enormous difference to the ability of all of our distinguished speakers to attend."

Professor Anya Hurlbert MD PhD
Director, Institute of Neuroscience, University of Newcastle upon Tyne

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