CANCELLED New Recent Psychological and Physiological Advances in Young-Maxwell-Helmholtz Theory of Color Vision
Please note: the instructor will be presenting from an offsite location and will not be present in the classroom.
Instructors: Charles Wu, Perception and Cognition Research
Level: Introductory
Duration: 2 hours
Course Time: 10:45 - 12:45
Prerequisites: A very basic understanding of human color vision (such as gained from a Vision Science or Imaging Science course).
Benefits
This course enables the attendee to:
- Learn evidence from philosophical, psychological, and physiological perspectives to understand Hering’s Opponent-Colors Theory (OCT) versus the now-widely understood Young-Maxwell-Helmholtz's Trichromatic Theory.
- Relate several visual phenomena with recent findings in visual neuroscience to show evidence that a key mechanism of Young-Maxwell-Helmholtz's Trichromatic Theory relates to the V1-L4 as the neural substrate for color sensations (i.e., color appearance).
Course Description
This course will consist of three parts. First, the theories and models about human color vision at the perceptual/psychophysical level are discussed. For over 140 years, there have been two dominant theories about human color vision: Young-Maxwell-Helmholtz's Trichromatic Theory and Hering's Opponent-Colors Theory (OCT). A recent advance in this domain presents the shortcoming of the OCT—as stated by a review paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences: “Color appearance and the end of Hering’s OCT” (Conway et al., 2023). This first part reviews prominent arguments and evidence from philosophical, psychological, and physiological perspectives to compare the OCT and the Trichromatic Theory, explaining why the latter is now the currently held theory. Second, the course introduces relevant new advances in visual neuroscience and then correlate some visual phenomena (including the La Hire phenomenon, which is seeing one’s own blind spots) with such advances to show that the V1-L4 (the thalamic recipient layer in the primary visual cortex) is the neural substrate for trichromatic color sensations, thereby establishing this key mechanism of the Trichromatic Theory on a solid neuroscientific basis. Third, the course discusses potential applications of this neuroscientifically based model about human color vision in imaging and display technologies.
Charles Q. Wu received his MS in electrical engineering from Nanjing Automation Research Institute (NARI) in China (1988) and his PhD in cognitive psychology from Carnegie Mellon University (1992). From 1992 to 1995, he was a postdoctoral researcher in visual neuroscience at the Institute of Ophthalmology, University College London. He conducts independent research in color vision and binocular vision, primarily from theoretical and computational perspectives. During 2021-2025, he has worked at Meta Reality Labs on eye tracking features in AR/VR device.