Psychological Science
Psychological Science
5 years ago

Representing Color Ensembles.

Colors are rarely uniform, yet little is known about how people represent color distributions. We introduce a new method for studying color ensembles based on intertrial learning in visual search. Participants looked for an oddly colored diamond among diamonds with colors taken from either uniform or Gaussian color distributions. On test trials, the targets had various distances in feature space from the mean of the preceding distractor color distribution. Targets on test trials therefore served as probes into probabilistic representations of distractor colors. Test-trial response times revealed a striking similarity between the physical distribution of colors and their internal representations. The results demonstrate that the visual system represents color ensembles in a more detailed way than previously thought, coding not only mean and variance but, most surprisingly, the actual shape (uniform or Gaussian) of the distribution of colors in the environment.

Publisher URL: http://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617713787

DOI: 10.1177/0956797617713787

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.