Search

The idea of colour opponency maintains that colour vision arises through the comparison of two chromatic mechanisms, red versus green and yellow versus blue. The four unique hues, red, green, blue, and yellow, are assumed to appear at the null points of these the two chromatic systems. Here we hypothesise that, if unique hues represent a tractable cortical state, they should elicit more robust activity compared to other, non-unique hues. We use a spatiotemporal decoding approach to report that electroencephalographic (EEG) responses carry robust information about the tested isoluminant unique hues within a 100-350 ms window from stimulus onset. Decoding is possible in both passive and active viewing tasks, but is compromised when concurrent high luminance contrast is added to the colour signals. For large hue-differences, the efficiency of hue decoding can be predicted by mutual distance in a nominally uniform perceptual colour space. However, for small perceptual neighbourhoods around unique hues, the encoding space shows pivotal non-uniformities which suggest that anisotropies in neurometric hue-spaces may reflect perceptual unique hues., Competing Interests: Competing Interests The authors declare no competing interests., (Copyright © 2023. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Deuteranomalous color matching behavior is different from normal because the middle-wavelength sensitive cones contain an abnormal L' pigment instead of the M pigment of the normal observer. However, there is growing evidence that deuteranomalous color experience is not very different from that of normal trichromats. Here, normal and deuteranomalous observers chose monochromatic unique yellow lights. They also chose broadband lights, displayed on a computer monitor, that corresponded to eight special colors: the Hering unique hues (red, yellow, green, blue), and binary colors perceptually midway between them (orange, lime, cyan, purple). Deuteranomalous monochromatic unique yellow was shifted towards red, but all the broadband special color selections were physically similar for normal and deuteranomalous observers. Deuteranomalous special colors, including monochromatic unique yellow, were similar to those of normal observers when expressed in a color-opponent chromaticity diagram based on their own visual pigments, but only if (1) color-opponent responses were normalized to white, and (2) the deuteranomalous diagram was expanded along the r - g dimension to compensate for the reduced difference between deuteranomalous L- and L'-cone photopigments. Particularly, deuteranomalous observers did not choose binary colors with extra r - g impact to overcome their insensitivity along the r - g dimension. This result can only be compatible with the known abnormality of the deuteranomalous L' photopigment if deuteranomalous observers adjust their perceptual representation of colors to compensate for their color vision deficiency., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

This study investigated categorical perception for unique hues in order to establish a relationship between color appearance, color discrimination, and low-level (second-stage) mechanisms. We tested whether pure red, yellow, green, and blue, (unique hues) coincide with troughs, and their transitions (binary hues) with peaks of sensitivity in DKL-space. Results partially confirmed this idea: JNDs demarcated perceptual categories at the binary hues around green, blue and less clearly around yellow, when colors were isoluminant with the background and when accounting for the overall variation of sensitivity by fitting an ellipse. The categorical JND pattern for those three categories was in line with the effect of the second-stage mechanisms. In contrast, the results for unique red, binary red-yellow, and the JNDs for dark colors clearly contradicted categorical perception. There was a JND maximum around the center of red and JNDs strongly decreased away from the center. Although this observation alone would also be in line with categorical perception; unique red was shifted away from the center towards yellow so that unique red was close to the minimum instead of the maximum JND, hence contradicting categorical perception. In addition, we also showed that observers do not adjust unique hues more consistently than binary hues, confirming a previous study. Taken together, our findings suggest that some of the unique hues could be inherent in the early stages of color processing. At the same time, they also raise questions about complex effects of lightness, chroma and instructions on the measurements of JNDs and unique hues., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

While studies of human color vision have made enormous strides, an overarching rationale for the circular sense of color relationships generated by two classes of color opponent neurons and three cone types is still lacking. Here we suggest that color circularity, color opponency and trichromacy may have arisen, at least in part, because of the geometrical requirements needed to unambiguously distinguish all possible spectrally different regions on a plane.

The aim of this study was twofold, first to determine the effect of field view size and second of illumination conditions on the selection of unique hue samples (UHs: R, Y, G and B) from two rotatable trays, each containing forty highly chromatic Natural Color System (NCS) samples, on one tray corresponding to 1.4° and on the other to 5.7° field of view size. UH selections were made by 25 color-normal observers who repeated assessments three times with a gap of at least 24h between trials. Observers separately assessed UHs under four illumination conditions simulating illuminants D65, A, F2 and F11. An apparent hue shift (statistically significant for UR) was noted for UH selections at 5.7° field of view compared to those at 1.4°. Observers' overall variability was found to be higher for UH stimuli selections at the larger field of view. Intra-observer variability was found to be approximately 18.7% of inter-observer variability in selection of samples for both sample sizes. The highest intra-observer variability was under simulated illuminant D65, followed by A, F11, and F2., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The unique hues--blue, green, yellow, red--form the fundamental dimensions of opponent-color theories, are considered universal across languages, and provide useful mental representations for structuring color percepts. However, there is no neural evidence for them from neurophysiology or low-level psychophysics. Tapping a higher prelinguistic perceptual level, we tested whether unique hues are particularly salient in search tasks. We found no advantage for unique hues over their nonunique complementary colors. However, yellowish targets were detected faster, more accurately, and with fewer saccades than their complementary bluish targets (including unique blue), while reddish-greenish pairs were not significantly different in salience. Similarly, local field potentials in primate V1 exhibited larger amplitudes and shorter latencies for yellowish versus bluish stimuli, whereas this effect was weaker for reddish versus greenish stimuli. Consequently, color salience is affected more by early neural response asymmetries than by any possible mental or neural representation of unique hues., (© 2015 ARVO.)

An achromatic stimulus is defined as a patch of light that is devoid of any hue. This is usually achieved by asking observers to adjust the stimulus such that it looks neither red nor green and at the same time neither yellow nor blue. Despite the theoretical and practical importance of the achromatic locus, little is known about the variability in these settings. The main purpose of the current study was to evaluate whether achromatic settings were dependent on the task of the observers, namely the navigation direction in color space. Observers could either adjust the test patch along the two chromatic axes in the CIE u*v* diagram or, alternatively, navigate along the unique-hue lines. Our main result is that the navigation method affects the reliability of these achromatic settings. Observers are able to make more reliable achromatic settings when adjusting the test patch along the directions defined by the four unique hues as opposed to navigating along the main axes in the commonly used CIE u*v* chromaticity plane. This result holds across different ambient viewing conditions (Dark, Daylight, Cool White Fluorescent) and different test luminance levels (5, 20, and 50 cd/m(2)). The reduced variability in the achromatic settings is consistent with the idea that internal color representations are more aligned with the unique-hue lines than the u* and v* axes.