Abstract
It has been suggested that ratios of photoreceptor catches for the light reflected by pairs of surfaces play an important role in color vision (Foster & Nascimento, 1994). We provide results from simulations showing that L, M and S ratios obtained from surface pairs consisting of a colored surface and an achromatic surface of the same luminosity reach their extreme values for a few specific colored surfaces, namely red, green, blue and yellow surfaces. There is a striking correspondence between the colors singled out in this way and the ones singled out in cross-cultural studies of color naming (Regier, Kay & Cook, 2005). These results will be compared with a related approach proposed in Philipona & O'Regan (in press), which further addressed the question of unique hues and hue cancellation.
References
- Nascimento Foster. (1994). Relational colour constancy from invariant cone-excitation ratios. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B. 257, 115-121.
- Kay Regier Cook. (2005). Focal colors are universal after all. Proc. Natn. Acad. Sci. USA. 102, 8386-8391.
- O'Regan Philipona (in press). Color naming, unique hues and hue cancellation predicted from singularities in reflection properties. Vis. Neurosci.