Colour Perception: Mind and the physical world

Colour has long been a source of fascination to both scientists and philosophers. In one sense, colours are in the mind of the beholder, in another sense they belong to the external world. Colours appear to lie on the boundary where we have divided the world into 'objective' and 'subjective' events. They represent, more than any other attribute of our visual experience, a place where both physical and mental properties are interwoven in an intimate and enigmatic way. The last few decades have brought fascinating changes in the way that we think about 'colour' and the role 'colour' plays in our perceptual architecture. In Colour Perception: Mind and the physical world, leading scholars from cognitive psychology, philosophy, neurophysiology, and computational vision provide an overview of the contemporary developments in our understanding of colours and of the relationship between the 'mental' and the 'physical'. With each chapter followed by critical commentaries, the volume presents a lively and accessible picture of the intellectual traditions which have shaped research into colour perception. Written in a non-technical style and accessible to an interdisciplinary audience, the book will provide an invaluable resource for researchers in colour perception and the cognitive sciences.

Table of Contents:
Preface 1: Koenderink & van Dorn: Perspectives on colour space Commentaries: MacLeod: From physics to perception through colorimetry: a bridge too far? Whittle: Colorimetry fortified 2: Webster: Light adaptation, contrast adaptation, and human colour vision Commentary: Faul: Adaptation and the ambiguity of response measures with respect to internal structure 3: Whittle: Contrast colours Commentaries: Webster: A background to colour vision Irtel: Contrast coding and what else? 4: D'Zmura: Colour and the processing of chromatic information Commentary: Maloney: The processing of chromatic information 5: MacLeod & von der Twer: The pleistochrome: optimal opponent codes for natural colours Commentary: Webster: Thinking outside the black box 6: Hatfield: Objectivity and subjectivity revisited: colour as a psychobiological property Commentary: Whittle: Why is this game still being played? 7: MacLeod & Golz: A computational analysis of colour constancy Commentary: Maloney: The importance of realistic models of surface and light in the study of human colour vision 8: Brown: Backgrounds and illuminants: the yin and yang of colour constancy Commentaries: Hoffman: Colour construction Maloney: Fitting linear models to data 9: Maloney: Surface colour perception and environmental constraints Commentaries: Hatfield: On the function of colour vision Jacob: Intrinsic colours - and what it is like to see them 10: Brainard, Kraft & Longere: Colour constancy: developing empirical tests of computational models Commentaries: Maloney: Surface colour perception and its environments Ekroll & Golz: Comparing the behaviour of machine vision algorithms and human observers 11: Maloney & Yang: The illuminant estimation hypothesis and surface colour perception Commentary: Brainard: Surface colour appearance in nearly natural images 12: Hoffman: The interaction of colour and motion Commentary: Brown: The interaction of perceived colour and perceived motion 13: Mausfeld: 'Colour' as part of the format of different perceptual primitives: The dual coding of colour Commentaries: MacLeod: Phenomenology and mechanism Hoffman: An internalist account of colour 14: Gilchrist: The importance of errors in perception 15: Schwartz: Avoiding errors about error Commentaries: Gilchrist: Deconstructing the concept of error? Whittle: Talking across the divide Brown: On the veridicality of lightness perception 16: McLaughlin: The place of colour in nature Commentaries: Atherton: Asking about the nature of colour Whittle: Who dictates what is real Index

Review :
a scholarly and erudite publication that will no doubt prove to be a useful reference source ... a thought-provoking book that provides an ambitious and broad perspective on how and why our nervous systems might construct colour. Colour Technology, 120