Color Discrimination

Nature Neuroscience is reporting on a recent study conducted by psychologists at the University of Giessen in Germany that gives insight into the mental processing of color. According the the results, the human brain will attribute an expected color to a picture of a familiar item, in this case yellow to a banana, even if the representation is made up of only shades of gray.

Subjects asked to adjust the color of a photo of bananas to match a gray background consistently moved the color too far in the blue direction (the opposite of yellow on the color wheel). When the same exercise was done with a shape not associated with a color (a plain circle, for example), the subjects were able to successfully match the background.

These results build on previous studies which have shown the mind to recall colors as being more intense then they really were and to see colors differently on the left as compared to the right.