“This is the first time natural changes in the environment have been shown to affect our perception of colour”. Some of the countries have similar meanings for the same color, while others have radically different meanings. Color perception changes with seasons, as there is a handful of factors which influence the way our eyes can comprehend both light, surroundings and ultimately shades. Despite the fact that different populations perceive colors differently and often disagree on what “real red”, “real blue” and “real green” look like, they all agree on what “real yellow” looks like.
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More specifically the way in which our eyes process the color unique yellow changes over seasons.
What they found was that the hue we consider to be “real yellow” looks a lot different in the winter than it does in the summer. They published their findings in the paper “Human colour perception changes between seasons”, which appears in the most recent issue of Current Biology.
Yellow is one of four “unique hues” perceived by the human eye, along with blue, green, and red. Researchers have begun to discover the reason why unique yellow is extremely stable and how it could be changed together with the natural world’s color.
In order to conduct their study, researchers instructed 67 men and women to go in a darkened room in January and June.
“What we are finding is that between seasons our vision adapts to changes in environment”, study author Lauren Welbourne said in the release. They were given the freedom to adjust the dial of the machine until they detect unique yellow colour without any hint of green or red colour.
‘In York, you typically have grey, boring winters and then in summer you have greenery everywhere. Our vision compensates for those changes and that, surprisingly, changes what we think “yellow” looks like.
She further added that if the amount of green light increases, the M-cones are said to be reduced to “L-M opponent” which is responsible for setting unique yellow point.
As a vision scientist herself, Welbourne finds the conclusions fascinating and considers them to be very informative on how visual processing works.
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Welbourne said that although no disorder can fixed by this, the more they learn about how vision and colour in particular is processed, the better they can understand exactly how humans see the world.
