Periodic Reporting for period 4 - COLOURMIND (Colouring the Mind: the Impact of Visual Environment on Colour Perception)
Berichtszeitraum: 2023-01-01 bis 2024-06-30
The COLOURMIND project aims to understand how perception draws on experience by investigating the impact of the visual environment on the perception of colour. The COLOURMIND project aims to tackle three main questions: What aspects of colour perception are affected by the visual environment, such that people from different environments perceive colour differently?; What processes enable colour perception to calibrate to visual experience and what is their nature and scope?; Does colour perception ‘tune-in’ to the visual input experienced during infancy with long lasting implications for mature perception? COLOURMIND is adopting a diverse range of methods to address these questions. One set of studies is quantifying variation in chromatic scene statistics and illumination across radically different environments (e.g. jungle, urban, arctic) and seasons and is investigating whether this variation relates to differences in the colour perception of people immersed in those environments. A second set of studies aims to elucidate the nature and scope of calibrative processes in colour perception. ‘Altered-Reality’ is being used to create immersive environments with manipulated chromatic scene statistics and experiments are investigating how observers’ colour perception calibrates to these manipulations. Innovative neuroimaging methods are also being used to identify how the visual cortex represents chromatic scene statistics. Finally, COLOURMIND is conducting experiments with infants to address the impact of the chromatic environment on the early development of colour perception. The methodological innovation, data and theory that result will lead to advances in understanding how the human mind perceives colour, the role of experience in perceptual development and the calibration and optimisation of the visual system to the environment.
The methodological innovation of COLOURMIND also provides progress. Considerable effort has gone into calibrating ipad models to enable online and remote testing of colour perception with accurate colour rendering. This opens up many possibilities for doing precise colour science outside of the psychophysics lab in the field, and online, the latter being particularly important during the pandemic. This has also enabled the team to do colour science with infants remotely over zoom, without needing parents and babies to come into the lab for face to face testing. This method of ‘baby zoom’ testing enables more geographically diverse infant samples to be recruited and makes it considerably easier for parents to take part in science. COLOURMIND is also making notable methodological advances in a number of other ways, the project has: devised protocols for capturing observer’s lived ‘visual diet’ with head cams and body worn spectral sensors; provided new psychophysical tasks for measuring infant sensitivity to visual stimuli; and provided new methods of chromatic image analysis and manipulation.