Abstract
Goethe wrote: “All theory is gray,” and his complaint is particularly applicable to studies of the earliest processes in color vision — the events at the receptor level. The phenomena of color vision that impress us most are seldom traceable to receptor behaviour. But still it is important to be clear about the ways receptors constrain sensation and the ways they don’t. Most obviously, the receptors are the sole source of the information on which color vision depends. Radiation that fails to stimulate the receptors can’t be seen; and stimuli that are equal to one another in their effects on the receptors have to appear identical if viewed under similar conditions. We do tend to forget this, because we generally know the stimuli only through our own visual reactions to them; but, when we neglect the physical diversity of color stimuli in this way we can be seriously misled. For instance, we may fail to appreciate the basic point that surfaces that are visually indistinguishable under one source of illumination will in general appear different from one another when the illuminant is changed.
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© 1985 The Wenner-Gren Center
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MacLeod, D.I.A. (1985). Receptoral Constraints on Colour Appearance. In: Ottoson, D., Zeki, S. (eds) Central and Peripheral Mechanisms of Colour Vision. Wenner-Gren Center International Symposium Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08020-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08020-5_7
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