New study sheds light on colour vision

The colours people perceive are due to colour information at every local patch of an image rather than how colours interact when they transition from one point to another, according to a new study by City University London.

To investigate the effect, researchers filtered natural images to remove the colour differences except at the edges, finding the edge information was not sufficient to carry the colour perception in the regions where the colour had been removed.

Professor Christopher Tyler, lead author of the study, said: ‘Our new study highlights the important role of colour processing cells. Instead of the transitions between colours influencing the colours seen through “filling-in”, we instead found that the individual colours seen at each local point determine what we see.’