Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research, National Eye Institute and National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, M.I.T., Cambridge, MA 02139, USA; Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02114, USA.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2023 Sep;27(9):791-804. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2023.06.003. Epub 2023 Jul 1.
Hering's Opponent-Colors Theory has been central to understanding color appearance for 150 years. It aims to explain the phenomenology of colors with two linked propositions. First, a psychological hypothesis stipulates that any color is described necessarily and sufficiently by the extent to which it appears reddish-versus-greenish, bluish-versus-yellowish, and blackish-versus-whitish. Second, a physiological hypothesis stipulates that these perceptual mechanisms are encoded by three innate brain mechanisms. We review the evidence and conclude that neither side of the linking proposition is accurate: the theory is wrong. We sketch out an alternative, Utility-Based Coding, by which the known retinal cone-opponent mechanisms represent optimal encoding of spectral information given competing selective pressure to extract high-acuity spatial information; and phenomenological color categories represent an adaptive, efficient, output of the brain governed by behavioral demands.
黑林的对立色觉理论已经成为 150 年来理解颜色外观的核心理论。它旨在用两个相关联的命题来解释颜色的现象学。首先，一个心理学假设规定，任何颜色都必然且充分地由其呈现出的红-绿、蓝-黄和黑-白程度来描述。其次，一个生理学假设规定，这些感知机制由三个内在的大脑机制编码。我们回顾了证据，并得出结论，连接命题的双方都不准确：该理论是错误的。我们勾勒出一个替代理论，即基于效用的编码，根据提取高空间精度信息的竞争选择性压力，已知的视锥细胞对立机制代表了光谱信息的最佳编码；而现象学颜色类别则代表了受行为需求支配的大脑的适应性、高效输出。
