Color Perception: Physiological

Karl Gegenfurtner

When we view the world around us, we attribute color to the individual objects we look at. But, as was discovered by Sir Isaac Newton, the light rays being reflected from these objects into our eyes are not colored. How we see color depends on the visual processing going on in the eyes and the cortex. Color vision starts with the absorption of light in three different types of light sensitive receptors in the eye, which convert electromagnetic energy into electrical signals, which in turn are transformed into action potentials by a complicated network of cells in the retina. The information is sent to the visual cortex via three independent channels with different chromatic preferences. In the cortex, information from these channels is mixed to enable perception of a large variety of different hues. Furthermore, recent evidence suggests that color analysis and coding cannot be separated from the analysis and ...

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