Color and Cognitive Science —The Effects of Color in High-level Vision and Cognition—

Abstract

The traditional theories of scene recognition, scene gist, change detection and blindness have emphasized the role of achromatic (luminance) information in high-level vision. However, the accumulating behavioral, neuroimaging and psychological evidence indicates that the surface color of an object and the coloration of a scene affect their cognition. In this article, we discuss the research that examines the conditions under which color influences the operations of high-level vision and the neural substrates that might mediate these operations. Also individual difference of color perception and recognition might be attributed to the plasticity of high-level vision. The relationship between color and cognition must be emphasized in the model of high-level vision.