To perceive scenes and the people and objects within them, the human mind must accommodate the dynamic and variable nature of the world, with variation in lighting, multiple viewpoints, and a plethora of contexts and environments. The human mind copes with these demands by constructing a perception of the world that draws on experience. However, the relative contribution and interaction of experience and ‘innate’ biological processes has been the focus of much multidisciplinary argument. In addition, there is extensive debate on which aspects of perception are modulated by experience, the nature and neural mechanisms of the processes involved, and the contribution of experience to human perceptual development. Colour perception is an excellent testing ground for these debates since it is a well characterised and fundamental feature of human vision.
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.
