1 Laboratory for Visual Perception and Visuomotor Control, Faculty of Psychology, School of Health Sciences, University of Iceland.
2 Cognitive Research Lab, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.
Psychol Sci. 2017 Oct;28(10):1510-1517. doi: 10.1177/0956797617713787. Epub 2017 Sep 1.
Colors are rarely uniform, yet little is known about how people represent color distributions. We introduce a new method for studying color ensembles based on intertrial learning in visual search. Participants looked for an oddly colored diamond among diamonds with colors taken from either uniform or Gaussian color distributions. On test trials, the targets had various distances in feature space from the mean of the preceding distractor color distribution. Targets on test trials therefore served as probes into probabilistic representations of distractor colors. Test-trial response times revealed a striking similarity between the physical distribution of colors and their internal representations. The results demonstrate that the visual system represents color ensembles in a more detailed way than previously thought, coding not only mean and variance but, most surprisingly, the actual shape (uniform or Gaussian) of the distribution of colors in the environment.
颜色很少是均匀的，但人们对颜色分布的表示方式知之甚少。我们介绍了一种新的方法，基于视觉搜索中的试验间学习来研究颜色组合。参与者在钻石中寻找一颗颜色异常的钻石，这些钻石的颜色取自均匀或高斯颜色分布。在测试试验中，目标与前一个干扰颜色分布的平均值在特征空间中有不同的距离。因此，测试试验中的目标可以作为对干扰颜色的概率表示的探针。测试试验的反应时间显示出颜色的物理分布和它们的内部表示之间惊人的相似性。结果表明，视觉系统以比以前想象的更详细的方式表示颜色组合，不仅编码均值和方差，而且最令人惊讶的是，环境中颜色分布的实际形状（均匀或高斯）。
