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To: doc30
Also, don't forget that color is a matter of perception in the brain and not an actual physical property of a material.

Color vision in humans is generally studied by having the subject mix three monochromatic (narrow band filtered) color sources to match a pigment sample. That doesn't contradict what you said, but it reduces the effect of learning color names.

176 posted on 07/03/2006 4:08:12 PM PDT by js1138 (Well I say there are some things we don't want to know! Important things!")
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To: js1138
Color vision in humans is generally studied by having the subject mix three monochromatic (narrow band filtered) color sources to match a pigment sample.

You are correct and I'm quite aware of the sciecne behind quantifying color vision in humans. I'm a spectroscopist who had to write software to quantify color, amongst other things, for the business I'm in. It's easy to represent color in a variety of 2 dimensional color coordinate systems like L*a*b* (a*b* being the color portion, L* representing the lightness or darkness of a color). Imagine how much more complicated that would be for a tetrachromatic system? That would be color in 3-dimensional coordinates with a fourth dimension for lightness. Very difficult to mentally visualize. Our color wheel would essentially be a 2D surface in a 3D color space. You would have UV mixed with the other 3 primary colors. So you could have yellow, blue and red, their combinations and then all of those combinations with various amounts of UV. You could have UV+blue as a new color, as well as UV+red and UV+yellow. The vividness of an avian vision system must be incredible. The authors in the article attempted this very thing by estimating the spectral response and luminosity of a given object based on avian photoreceptor sensitivity would have in this color space and see if the birds could distinguish it from other UV-color objects. The theory matched the bird behaviour very well.

Since we lost the color receptors and then gained one back, I wonder if our brains neurologically could process a tetrachromatic color system.

177 posted on 07/03/2006 4:24:16 PM PDT by doc30 (Democrats are to morals what and Etch-A-Sketch is to Art.)
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