Psychology 2015A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Dichromacy, Green Paper, Dichromatism

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2015A/B
• Professor: John Campbell

Document Summary

I: 1986, oliver sacks receives a letter from mr. Why can we see colour: we evolved this ability so we could detect fruit in our environment. Functions of color perception: color signals help us classify and identify objects, color helps facilitate perceptual organization of small elements into larger objects, color vision may provide an evolutionary advantage in foraging for food. Selective reflection - you can only see certain colour. Selective transmission: only some wavelengths pass through objects, transmission curves, plots of the percentage of light are transmitted at each wavelength. Colour and light: newton, thought white light was mixture of many colors. Evidence for the trichromatic theory: researchers measured absorption spectra of visual pigments in receptors (1960s, they found that there were three different cone pigments: Short wavelength pigment (419nm: medium wavelength pigment (531nm) Long wavelength pigment (558nm: this means that color perception is based on the pattern of activity of these three cone receptor mechanisms,