Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 4, 2026

Visualizing Visual Adaptation
Published on: April 24, 2017
Role of color memory in successive color constancy
1Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University, Framlington Place, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 4HH, UK. yazhu.ling@ncl.ac.uk
Abstract:
We investigate color constancy for real 2D paper samples using a successive matching paradigm in which the observer memorizes a reference surface color under neutral illumination and after a temporal interval selects a matching test surface under the same or different illumination. We find significant effects of the illumination, reference surface, and their interaction on the matching error. We characterize the matching error in the absence of illumination change as the "pure color memory shift" and introduce a new index for successive color constancy that compares this shift against the matching error under changing illumination. The index also incorporates the vector direction of the matching errors in chromaticity space, unlike the traditional constancy index. With this index, we find that color constancy is nearly perfect.
Related Concept Videos
Color Vision
Perceptual Constancy
Size constancy is the recognition that an object remains the same size, even when its image on the retina changes. For instance, a bus is perceived to be large enough to carry people, even if it looks tiny from...
Photoreceptors and Visual Pathways
Eyewitness Memory
One such error is memory distortion, which occurs because human memory does not function like a...
System of Memory
Vision

