Can color perception be influenced by something other than what light enter the eye?

Submitted by MagicSquare8-9 t3_yvfhb5 in askscience

Imagine one test subject being put into 2 different situations, such that the light entering their eyes is the same in both situation, but the subject is under different conditions (hot vs cold, hungry vs full, angry vs sad, etc.). The light entering their eyes does not have to be monochrome, it could be something complicated like a picture. Is it possible for the subject to observe completely different color? Like white vs clue?

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albasri t1_iwe9oly wrote

Internal states like you describe, no. But contextual information can. For example, in this image all of the eyes are gray. The light that reaches your eye is the same from each eye in the image. But we experience the left eyes as colored.

Here is a video of a color adaptation / afterimage effect. After adapting to the first image, the second, grayscale image appears colored.

Having a word/term (concept) for a color can affect performance in various behavioral tasks (e.g. categorization speed). For example, in Russian there is a distinct word for "light blue". Russian speakers are faster at matching tasks that use that color than speakers of languages that do not have that term. It does not mean that they cannot see the color, of see it inaccurately. Much like if we look at an xray, we see the same image as a radiologist, but they are able to detect patterns and meaningful structures that we cannot. See this article about it: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11759-russian-speakers-get-the-blues/

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MagicSquare8-9 OP t1_iwed2nj wrote

>But contextual information can.

I guess, for the purpose of my question, the issue is whether the contextual information must be delivered visually. For example, let's say the test subject look through a small hole into monochrome grey wall with no other contextual information, then the experimenter tells the subject that the wall is being illuminated by red/green/blue lighting (or maybe the 2 events occur in the opposite order). But the subject never see the light bulb itself or any other objects that would allow them to deduce the actual color of the lighting. Would that affect color perception?

My analogy is with perception of sound direction. Our perception of where the sound is coming from can be overridden by visual information, that's how ventriloquism works. So it seems plausible that visual perception can be overridden by non-visual information as well. This does happen for certain kind of visual perception, but color perception seems to be the most impervious to these effects, which is why I wonder.

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albasri t1_iwfgai9 wrote

In general, being told something should have no impact on our vision except in specific, ambiguous circumstances. We want our interperetations of the world to be stable.

One example could be the dress illusion. For some people, being told of an alternate interpretation of the scene causes the dress to appear to be a different color.

Another example might be Fuller et al. 2006. Here, an attentional cue affects the perceived saturation (but not hue) of a stimulus. This is sort of like being told something ("look over here") and having that affect your perception.

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Sissyfromhell t1_iwfgxnt wrote

Idk if it's against the rules to comment without source or citation but I do know that when we see and perceive objects in our peripheral vision, our brain will sometimes assume it is one thing and "see" whatever they're perceiving it as (in their periphery mind you), and therefore see it as the color we remember it to be. It doesn't help that there's minimal color perception in peripheral vision, mostly black & white, this furthers the color assumptions. I sometimes mistake things out the corner of my eye like curtains or furniture or decor for something they're not and I will assume what it is based on what I see in my periphery- this effects the colors I see. The shape of a curtain and a tall dresser are similar to my eye in my peripheral vision, based on these assumptions, if I'm paying it enough attention, I might "see" a colorful curtain, or a brown wooden dresser in my periphery, when what I'm seeing is in fact neither of those things.

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Seraph199 t1_iwggzy3 wrote

Not likely, though color perception can differ from person to person and even from eye to eye based on the concentrations of receptors in the retina for reading different light wavelengths

One of my eyes perceives the world slightly more blue while the other eye's perception is tinted slightly yellow. The difference is subtle but very noticeable when switching which eye I am looking through.

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