Colour is what the eye sees best

• Published in: Nature (London) Vol. 361; no. 6410; pp. 348 - 350
• Main Authors: Chaparro, A, Stromeyer, C. F, Huang, E. P, Kronauer, R. E, Eskew, Rhea T
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing 28.01.1993; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: Biological and medical sciences; Color; Color Perception - physiology; Eyes & eyesight; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Mathematics; Ocular Physiological Phenomena; Perception; Photic Stimulation; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Time Factors; Vision; Visual Fields; Visual Perception; Human; Visual stimulus; Detection threshold; Chromaticity; Psychophysics; Wavelength; Stimulus luminance; Colour vision
• ISSN: 0028-0836; 1476-4687
• DOI: 10.1038/361348a0

It has been argued by Watson, Barlow and Robson that the visual stimulus that humans detect best specifies the spatial-temporal structure of the receptive field of the most sensitive visual neurons. To investigate 'what the eye sees best' they used stimuli that varied in luminance alone. Because the most abundant primate retinal ganglion cells, the P cells, are colour-opponent, we might expect that a coloured pattern would also be detected well. We generalized Watson et al.'s study to include variations in colour as well as luminance. We report here that our best detected coloured stimulus was seen 5-9-fold better than our best luminance spot and 3-8-fold better than Watson's best luminance stimulus. The high sensitivity to colour is consistent with the prevalence and high colour contrast-gain of retinal P cells, and may compensate for the low chromatic contrasts typically found in natural scenes.