The span of cone ratios and color naming

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.