Are Color Experiences the Same across the Visual Field?

Abstract

It seems obvious to laypeople that neurotypical humans experience color equivalently across their entire visual field. To some neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers, though, this claim has been met with skepticism, as neurophysiological evidence indicates the mechanisms that support color perception degrade with eccentricity. However, the argument that this entails altered color experience in peripheral vision is not universally accepted. Here, we address whether color experience is essentially equivalent between central and peripheral vision. To assess this, we will obtain similarity relationships between color experiences across the visual field using both online and laboratory-based far-field displays, while removing the confounds of saccades, memory, and expectation about color experiences. Our experiment was designed to provide clear evidence that would favor either unchanged or altered color experience relationships in the periphery. Our results are consistent with lay people's phenomenological reports: Color experiences, as probed by similarity relationships in central vision and the far field (60°), are equivalent when elicited by large stimuli. These findings challenge the widespread view in philosophy and cognitive science that peripheral color experiences are illusory, and are discussed in the context of their related neurophysiological, psychophysical, and philosophical literature.