Focal Colors and Unique Hues

Prime colors and the hues

Forthcoming in Review of Philosophy and Psychology Prime colors and the hues Wayne Wright Abstract: This paper argues that the distinctiveness of the Hering primary hues – red, green, blue, and yellow – is already evident at the retina. Basic features of spectral sensitivity provide a foundation for the development of unique hue perceptions and the hue categories of which they are focal example...

Unique Hues

One can see so many different colors in the environment. And yet there are only four colors that occupy a special place in color perception. They are called unique hues and they originate from the opponent colors theory proposed by Ewald Hering in 1878 [1, 2]. The theory postulates three opponent processes: two chromatic processes of red-green and blue-yellow and one achromatic process of white...

Neural basis for unique hues

p = 0.38, respectively). Moreover, analyses of only high confidence states yielded similar results as when highand lowconfidence states were pooled (see Supplemental Data). Together with the numerically large and robust difference between expected and unexpected percepts in the test phase, these observations speak to a true perceptual bias rather than a mere response bias. Our work shows that e...

Empirical evidence for unique hues?

Red, green, blue, yellow, and white have been distinguished from other hues as unique. We present results from two experiments that undermine existing behavioral evidence to separate the unique hues from other colors. In Experiment 1 we used hue scaling, which has often been used to support the existence of unique hues, but has never been attempted with a set of non-unique primaries. Subjects w...

Empirical evidence for unique hues?