The science of colour and colour vision
Name
BYRTSO-6v3.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
262.95 KB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
1966cd5efe7f3c37572305acda2267bb
Author(s)
Byrne, Alexander
Hilbert, David R.
Date Issued
September 2020
Publisher
Routledge
Citation
Byrne, A and Hilbert, DR. 2020. "The science of colour and colour vision."
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Derek H. Brown and Fiona Macpherson; individual chapters, the contributors. Colour vision has been studied systematically from a variety of points of view since the nineteenth century. The science, the readers discuss draws on optics, psychology, neuroscience, neurology, ophthalmology, and biology. Only a very small segment of the total electromagnetic spectrum is relevant to most questions in colour science because the receptors in the eye only respond directly to a narrow range of wavelengths. Since colour vision requires the ability to distinguish between lights with different wavelengths, that means that colour vision requires contributions from at least two types of photoreceptors that differ in their spectral sensitivity. The three cone-types are morphologically indistinguishable, and although their existence was inferred in the nineteenth century in order to explain the observed characteristics of human colour vision, it was only in the late twentieth century that direct measurements of their spectral sensitivities were made, and the light absorbing photopigments.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351048521-11
