Lecture
The psychology of color perception — the human ability to perceive, identify and name colors.
The sensation of color depends on a complex of physiological, psychological and cultural-social factors. Initially, research on color perception was conducted within the framework of color science; later ethnographers, sociologists and psychologists joined in addressing the problem.
Color science is the science of analyzing the processes of color perception and color discrimination on the basis of systematized data from physics, physiology and psychology. Color science includes:
Bearers of different cultures perceive the color of objects differently. Depending on the importance of particular colors and shades in a people's everyday life, some of them may be reflected in the language to a greater or lesser degree.
For example, in the languages of "primitive" agricultural peoples there are many words — color names for designating shades of green, which is connected with the vitally important necessity of monitoring and assessing the condition of cultivated plants, evaluating harvest prospects, and so on.
The most "ancient" colors, the first to appear in human culture, are usually considered to be white, black and red.
The number of "basic" colors differs across cultures: the Ancient East posited a five-element world, in Europe 3 "basic" colors were recorded (first red, yellow and blue, and later red, green and blue), while since Newton's time people often speak of 7 colors (apart from the achromatic black and white, which are in fact the extreme poles of gray).
Visual receptors are rightly considered "a part of the brain brought out onto the surface of the body." Unconscious processing and correction of visual perception ensures the "correctness" of vision, and it is also the cause of "errors" in judging color under certain conditions. Thus, eliminating the "background" illumination of the eye (for example, when viewing distant objects through a narrow tube) substantially changes the perception of the color of those objects.
Professional calibration of color monitors requires the use of appropriate background lighting in the room, the operator wears a black coat, and the visual design elements of software products must be of a neutral color.
Among painters, three colors are recognized as primary: red, blue, yellow. Black is the absence of light and color, which is analogous to an unlit hole. White is undivided sunlight. From the mixing of adjacent primary colors the so-called composite colors are produced — orange, green and violet. Together with the three primaries, the primary mixtures make up the "painterly" solar spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. Light blue is not considered an independent spectral color, but rather a whitened blue, or more precisely a blue-green. Mixing the adjacent six colors yields 12 colors.
Studies conducted with 4-month-old infants have shown that they discriminate four groups of colors well (red, yellow, green and blue), without differentiating them by shade.
In the culture of different peoples, the emotional and applied perception of color varies greatly and is bound up with a long historical tradition within the relatively isolated development of an ethnos and religion. Hence the differences in the perception of, for example, white and black (mourning or joy — depending on the culture and religion).
Since a particular language and, more broadly, a particular culture concentrates the historical experience of its bearers, the mental representations of speakers of different languages may not coincide. As an example of how differently languages single out (or, as it is customary to say in linguistics, "conceptualize") extralinguistic reality, the terms of the color-designation system are often cited. Thus, Russian has two separate words, синий (dark blue) and голубой (light blue) — unlike many Germanic languages, in which the range of colors of the corresponding part of the spectrum is covered by a single designation, such as English blue (cf. German blau and French bleu). A similar system of designating dark and light blue colors is adopted in other Slavic languages, for example in Ukrainian and Polish.
For more detail on the associative series for each color, see the articles on individual colors (red, green, blue, bordeaux, etc.)
Color names are an element of the culture of a particular people, fixed in the vocabulary of the speakers of one language or another.
Color names may take on symbolic meaning.
The simultaneous viewing of the same non-self-luminous objects or light sources by several observers with normal color vision, under identical viewing conditions, makes it possible to establish an unambiguous correspondence between the spectral composition of the radiations being compared and the color sensations they evoke. Color measurements (colorimetry) are based on this. Such a correspondence is unambiguous but not one-to-one: identical color sensations may be evoked by radiation fluxes of differing spectral composition (metamerism).
There are many definitions of color as a physical quantity. But even in the best of them, from a colorimetric point of view, mention is often omitted of the fact that the aforementioned (non-mutual) unambiguity is achieved only under standardized conditions of observation, illumination, etc.; the change in color perception with a change in the intensity of radiation of the same spectral composition (the Bezold–Brücke phenomenon) is not taken into account; the so-called color adaptation of the eye is disregarded, and so on. Therefore the diversity of color sensations arising under real conditions of illumination, with variations in the angular sizes of the elements being compared by color, their fixation on different areas of the retina, different psychophysiological states of the observer, and so forth, is always richer than colorimetric color diversity.
For example, in colorimetry certain colors (such as orange or yellow) are defined identically, whereas in everyday life they are perceived (depending on lightness) as russet, "chestnut," brown, "chocolate," "olive," and so on. In one of the best attempts to define the concept of "color," belonging to Erwin Schrödinger, the difficulties are removed by the simple absence of any indication of the dependence of color sensations on numerous specific conditions of observation. According to Schrödinger, "color" is a property of the spectral composition of radiations that is common to all radiations visually indistinguishable to a human being.
Combinations of colors are perceived as harmonious (harmonizing) or not. It is held that different degrees of saturation and different shades of a single color harmonize (monochromatic and dominant color harmony), as do colors close together in the spectrum (analogous color harmony), opposite colors on the color wheel (complementary-contrast color harmony), as well as combinations of almost any other colors with white and black, which are not part of the color wheel — except for yellow with either of them, overly light colors with white, and overly dark colors with black .
Color combinations in order of decreasing quality of perception: blue on white, black on yellow, green on white, black on white, green on red, red on yellow, red on white, orange on black, black on purple, orange on white, red on green.
There exists color therapy — a branch of alternative medicine whose essence is treatment by means of color.
German scientists, having conducted a series of psychological tests, came to the conclusion that the color of athletes' uniforms influences referees' decisions . A football team dressed in red uniforms has an increased chance of winning when playing on its home ground.
According to a study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard, the color of text can influence decision-making. Statements in green elicit agreement .
| Medium | Scattering | Contrast | Principal effect |
|---|
| Ocean | strong | low | disappearance of red |
| Planetary atmospheres | moderate | medium | the color of the sky depends on the gas |
| Vacuum | almost none | very high | sharp shadows |
In technical applications, the meaning of color markers determines the use of each color quite rigidly.
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