Change in Appearance of Chromatic and Luminance Contrast of Colored Pictures in Human Visual Memory

Abstract

It is important to understand our color perception in memory because in our daily life we use our memory of the colors of objects when we compare them. So we studied exactly how we recognize the colors of the visual scenes that we have already experierced. A memory identification task was performed using natural scene pictures with various chromatic or luminance contrasts. Our experiment consisted of two stages, a memory stage and a recognition stage. The subjects' task was to judge, in recognition stage, if the picture was the same as that memorized. The results showed that people tend to remember a picture as having higher chromatic contrast than actually presented when they memorized it. This suggests that colors in our visual memory shift toward more saturated or categorically focal colors. This result should be taken into account when establishing the optimal method of estimating colors.