Gegenfurtner K R, Rieger J
Max-Planck-Institute für biologische Kybernetik, Tübingen, Germany.
Curr Biol. 2000 Jun 29;10(13):805-8. doi: 10.1016/s0960-9822(00)00563-7.
Although color plays a prominent part in our subjective experience of the visual world, the evolutionary advantage of color vision is still unclear [1] [2], with most current answers pointing towards specialized uses, for example to detect ripe fruit amongst foliage [3] [4] [5] [6]. We investigated whether color has a more general role in visual recognition by looking at the contribution of color to the encoding and retrieval processes involved in pattern recognition [7] [8] [9]. Recognition accuracy was higher for color images of natural scenes than for luminance-matched black and white images, and color information contributed to both components of the recognition process. Initially, color leads to an image-coding advantage at the very early stages of sensory processing, most probably by easing the image-segmentation task. Later, color leads to an advantage in retrieval, presumably as the result of an enhanced image representation in memory due to the additional attribute. Our results ascribe color vision a general role in the processing of visual form, starting at the very earliest stages of analysis: color helps us to recognize things faster and to remember them better.
尽管颜色在我们对视觉世界的主观体验中起着重要作用，但色觉的进化优势仍不明确[1][2]，目前大多数答案都指向特定用途，例如在树叶中检测成熟果实[3][4][5][6]。我们通过研究颜色对模式识别中涉及的编码和检索过程的贡献，来探究颜色在视觉识别中是否具有更普遍的作用[7][8][9]。自然场景彩色图像的识别准确率高于亮度匹配的黑白图像，并且颜色信息对识别过程的两个组成部分都有贡献。最初，颜色在感觉处理的非常早期阶段就带来图像编码优势，很可能是通过简化图像分割任务实现的。后来，颜色在检索方面带来优势，大概是由于额外属性使记忆中的图像表示增强的结果。我们的结果表明，色觉在视觉形式处理中从最早的分析阶段就发挥着普遍作用：颜色帮助我们更快地识别事物并更好地记住它们。
