The perception of color changes with the seasons. Free Technical Library News

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Perception of color changes with the seasons

27.08.2015

Although the eyes of all people are arranged in the same way, visual perception can differ markedly. For example, it is known that in severe depression everything is seen in gray, and this is not a figure of speech at all: a few years ago, researchers from the University of Freiburg measured the activity of retinal cells in several patients with a clinical form of depression and found that their retina does not perceive color contrast well - as if the image, the object were immersed in a gray haze. The thing is that a depressed, depressive state is accompanied by problems with some neurotransmitters, which are needed not only in the nerve chains responsible for emotions, but also for the transmission of a visual impulse. (Let's clarify in brackets that antidepressants had no effect on the "graying" of the world.)

But the perception of color is different in quite healthy people, without psychological problems. For example, we recently wrote about how memory prevents us from distinguishing colors: we tend to reduce all color shades to several colors, which for some reason we have made primary for ourselves. Another factor of "color correction" is cultural and linguistic features: it is believed that if a language has a designation for a color, then a person will distinguish it from others. (A classic example: the word "blue" helps Russian speakers to better distinguish the corresponding color compared to English speakers, who simply refer to this shade as "light blue".)

For all that, for a long time it was believed that everyone sees red, yellow, green and blue in the same way, without discrepancies. From a psychophysiological point of view, all four are called pure colors, while the rest turn out to be composite and are inevitably perceived with shades: for example, orange and red will always be visible, and this is where cultural and psychological “color filters” appear. Subsequently, clarifications arose here: although all people have an idea of \uXNUMXb\uXNUMXbpure red and pure green, in fact, pure colors can be located slightly at different wavelengths. And only yellow seems to be a universal constant: in different cultures it is seen in general in the same way.

However, as researchers from the University of York found out, yellow in our perception is also unstable, only its inconstancy is due not to individual psychological characteristics, and not cultural, but to the season.

In the experiments of Alex Wade (Alex Wade) and his colleagues, 67 men and women participated: they were introduced into a completely dark room, they were given time for their eyes to get used to the darkness, and then they were asked on a special device to choose such a yellow color that seemed to them " real", pure yellow. The experiment was repeated in January and June, and, as the authors of the work in Current Biology write, the choice was different in winter and summer, that is, “winter pure yellow” was different from “pure summer yellow”.

How exactly and where exactly the color balance is corrected, whether at the level of the retina, or already in the visual cortex of the brain, we do not yet know, but the fact itself can be explained by seasonal differences in the environment. In winter, the illumination and color saturation of what we see around us weakens, and a change in color vision probably plays a compensatory role. Moreover, during the day there are no such changes in the vision of yellow. Now it would be interesting to know if there is a seasonality in the perception of other colors, and how those who live in other geographical latitudes see the same yellow color, where winter and summer look different than in the north of England.

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