Chromatic induction and the layout of colours within a complex scene

Abstract

A target's apparent colour is influenced by the colours in its surrounding. If the surrounding consists of a single coloured surface, the influence is a shift 'away' from the surface's colour. If the surface is more than 1 degrees from the target area the shift is very small. If there are many surfaces, then not only the average luminance and chromaticity of the surfaces matters, but also the chromatic variability. It is not yet clear whether it makes any difference where the chromatic variability is within the scene, so we constructed stimuli in which the chromatic variability was restricted to certain regions. We found that it made very little difference where the chromatic variability was located. The extent to which the average colour of nearby surfaces influences the apparent colour of the target seems to depend on the average chromatic variability of the whole scene.

Color consilience: color through the lens of art practice, history, philosophy, and neuroscience

“…What lay behind Matisse's intention? A clue is provided by some classic psychophysical work reviewed by Brenner and his colleagues: 67 “It is known that chromatic induction is primarily determined by the color of directly adjacent surfaces…This is consistent with the idea that information at the borders is critical in determining the perceived color.” Chromatic induction is the Yin of the chromatic contrast Yang: it is the phenomenon whereby a target that appears an achromatic gray when placed on a white (or black) background will appear colored when surrounded by a color field; the induced color is the complementary color of the background. Figure 8A gives an example in which the “gray” central disc appears greenish; curiously, the induced color is often stronger as an afterimage: maintain your gaze on the black dot in the center of the disc, then after 10 seconds transfer your gaze to the black dot to the right.…”

“…What lay behind Matisse's intention? A clue is provided by some classic psychophysical work reviewed by Brenner and his colleagues: 67 "It is known that chromatic induction is primarily determined by the color of directly adjacent surfaces. .…”

Color naming reveals our ability to distinguish between a colored background and colored light

“…In simulated scenes, the extent to which chromaticity nearby a surface of interest is attributed to the illumination can be influenced both by giving explicit instructions without changing the image (e.g., Arend & Reeves, 1986) and by presenting information about the illumination within the image (e.g., by adding highlights: Yang & Maloney, 2001). The influence of the surrounding color is also known to depend on the luminance contrast (e.g., Brenner, Granzier, & Smeets, 2007;Gordon & Shapley, 2006), the overall range of chromaticity (e.g., Barnes, Wei, & Shevell, 1999;Brenner, Ruis, Herraiz, Cornelissen, & Smeets, 2003), the correlation between luminance and chromaticity (e.g., Golz & MacLeod, 2002;Granzier et al, 2005), and eye movements in combination with adaptation (Cornelissen & Brenner, 1995). In real scenes, there is normally enough information to identify the source of the color in the immediate surrounding of the surface of interest reasonably well (Brainard, 1998;Granzier et al, 2009a), although even in real scenes the true origin of color in the surrounding is not always completely unambiguous to the observer (Granzier et al, 2009b;Kraft & Brainard, 1999).…”

Transparency perception: the key to understanding simultaneous color contrast

“…For instance, the complementarity law cannot be applied to this case in any meaningful manner, and the effect instead seems to obey the direction law [5][6][7]. For this reason, it has been believed that the gamut expansion effect is a new kind of simultaneous contrast effect due to visual mechanisms distinct from those underlying the classical simultaneous contrast effect [2,5,8,9]. Drawing on many different lines of converging evidence, however, we have recently argued that classical simultaneous contrast and the gamut expansion effect both obey the direction law and are best regarded as different names for the same basic phenomenon [7,10,11].…”