Learning Objectives

  • Examine the relation of the wavelength of light to perceived color.
  • Diagram the perceptual principles of hue, saturation, and brightness and the role they play in our perception of color.
  • Formulate the idea of a metamer in additive and subtractive color mixing in terms of what we learn from color-matching experiments.
  • Examine the role of having three cone classes for our perception of color.
  • Describe the trichromatic theory of color vision and its relationship to the three classes of cones.
  • Illustrate the opponent-process theory of color vision focusing on what this theory can explain about color vision that trichromatic theory cannot.
  • Explain what we know about color vision in infancy and how it changes as we age.
  • Diagram the different types of color deficiency and explain why this term is, almost always, a better term than color blindness.
  • Assess the term constancy and how it applies to color vision.