PSY-3215 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Opponent Process, Ewald Hering, Afterimage
Document Summary
The answer is no - there are all kinds of primaries that will work. The exception: one of the primaries cannot be a metamer of the other two. Red, green, and yellow would not work because red and green makes yellow. Trichromatic theory: there are three wavelength detectors. Colors are a mix of the activation of the three detectors. People tend to organize colors by four primaries. When asking people to imagine a mix of colors, some mixes were easier to imagine than others. Red and yellow making orange is an easy mix. Red and green making yellow isn"t as easy. If a red is shown and then taken away, a green afterimage tends to be seen (and vice versa) Blue tends to produce a yellow afterimage (and vice versa) Opponent process theory: there are three wavelength detectors. Active in one direction produces one color and active in the other direction produces the other color.
