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LibraryResearch Articles & Papers

Color appearance and the end of Hering’s Opponent-Colors Theory

July 1st, 2023
This paper describes the classical trichromatic opponent theory of color vision, and attacks it from both phenomenological and physiological approaches.
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DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2023.06.003
Posted byBarak Reibman

Abstract/Description

Hering's Opponent-Colors Theory has been central to understanding color appearance for 150 years. It aims to explain the phenomenology of colors with two linked propositions. First, a psychological hypothesis stipulates that any color is described necessarily and sufficiently by the extent to which it appears reddish-versus-greenish, bluish-versus-yellowish, and blackish-versus-whitish. Second, a physiological hypothesis stipulates that these perceptual mechanisms are encoded by three innate brain mechanisms. We review the evidence and conclude that neither side of the linking proposition is accurate: the theory is wrong. We sketch out an alternative, Utility-Based Coding, by which the known retinal cone-opponent mechanisms represent optimal encoding of spectral information given competing selective pressure to extract high-acuity spatial information; and phenomenological color categories represent an adaptive, efficient, output of the brain governed by behavioral demands.