Colors That Stand Alone

Alexander Belsten, E. Paxon Frady, and Professor Bruno A. Olshausen have published a new paper in the Journal of the Optical Society of America. Titled “Emergence of unique hues from sparse coding of color in natural scenes,” their study addresses a longstanding mystery in vision science that was first described by the German physiologist Ewald Hering in the late nineteenth century: why humans experience certain colors—red, green, blue, and yellow—as perceptually “unique” (i.e., not as a mixture of other colors). They show that these unique colors emerge directly as a consequence of adapting a sparse coding strategy to the statistics of the natural visual environment. This provides, for the first time, a linking principle between the structure of the natural environment and the phenomenology of color appearance.

About the Image: Hering’s diagram of the Urfarben from Zur Lehre vom Lichtsinne (1878).

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