Abstract
LETTVIN1 has reviewed the central facts of colour constancy, colour contrast, Mach bands2, colour adaptation, colour brightness3 and the Land effect4. He formed a hypothesis to accommodate these phenomena in a single law. The only temporal effects he considered were adaptations of the type which produces after-images. The chief postulate that enabled Lettvin to accommodate the Land effect was that “subjectively brighter than adaptation level, L”, is equivalent to “subjectively yellower than L”; and “subjectively dimmer than L” is equivalent to “subjectively bluer than L”, as long as these relations are applied locally and only in aperture mode. There can be no sharp line boundaries between adjacent colour patches the subjective colours of which are governed by the equivalences.
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References
Lettvin, J., The Colors of Colored Things, MIT Quarterly Progress Report No. 87, 193 (autumn 1967).
Helmholtz, H., Treatise on Physiological Optics (Dover Pub., New York, 1962).
Stevens, S. S., Psychol. Rev., 64, 153 (1957).
Land, E. H., Amer. Sci., 52, 247 (1964).
Barlow, H., J. Physiol., 141, 337 (1966).
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KILMER, E., KILMER, W. Temporal Reversal of Land Effect Colour Rules. Nature 218, 883 (1968). https://doi.org/10.1038/218883a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/218883a0
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