The World Of Colour

David Katz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136306600
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

This is Volume VI of twenty-one in a collection of Cognitive Psychology. The first edition of this book appeared in 1911, and the second in 1930. It offers a study of the modes of appearance and measures of perception of colour and the phenomenology of illumination, as well as film colours like grey, transparent and translucent colours, light and space determined colours, contrast and theories of colour constancy.

THE WORLD OF COLOUR

PART I

MODES OF APPEARANCE OF COLOUR AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ILLUMINATION

§ I. INTRODUCTION

IF we were to attempt to give a simple description of what the eye in its everyday activity tells us, we should have to do it somewhat as follows. We see objects of all sorts, some far away, some near at hand. An inexhaustible wealth of shapes and structures meets the eye, and when we attempt to give them some sort of systematic classification, we tend to do so on the basis of some such distinction as that of the natural and the artificial. Whether objects are located in the immediate vicinity or miles away from us, we always perceive between ourselves and the objects an empty space in which no objects are to be found. Everything that is visible has certain colour-properties, even if in individual cases it is not always easy for us to find the appropriate colour-names. With the same immediacy with which we perceive the colours of objects comes the apprehension of their illumination ; and the illumination is not limited to the objects alone, for the empty space between objects is also seen as illuminated. It is important for our practical commerce with objects that we be able not only to perceive them but also to recognize the material of which they are composed, whether they be made of wood, paper, metal or other material. When objects are close at hand, we recognize their composition from the finer structures of the material which are then visible ; at greater distances, however, these means are no longer serviceable, and the eye has to make use of other criteria. The simple description of visual perception attempted here would not be complete without a reference to the fact that movement is normally present in the visual field. Objects can move from point to point in space, or movements can take place in objects.

The various aspects of visual perception to which reference has just been made represent distinct fields of psychological investigation, each with its correspondingly different methods. These branches concern themselves with the perception respectively of shape, of structure, of space, of colour and of movement. The studies reported in this book belong to the field of colour-perception, and it is our plan to pursue all the phenomena of visual perception which have anything to do with colour. Our interest in colour is not the interest of the physicist, nor again is it with those aspects of colour which puzzle the physiologist. Our concern is rather with the purely psychological problems of colour. From the psychological point of view, the field of colour includes also all our experiences of illumination, not the field of illuminating techniques but rather that of actually perceived illumination. The world as optic-aesthetic experience draws its beauty from the marvellous co-operation of colour-substance and illumination. Even if we are not going to be concerned with the spatial structure as such of the world, we shall have to consider spatial factors as they bear on colour. Inasmuch as space is always presented in coloured form, it plays an important part in determining the colour-impressions which we receive. Without the spatial factor we should lack the wealth of spatially organized modes of appearance which colours assume, and inasmuch as colour is always presented in spatial form it exercises a corresponding influence on the impression of space. Illumination operates as a creator and a destroyer of space ; even in the experience of empty space itself we see it as the really determining factor. Our study is not a study of configurations, but it must take into account the reciprocal relations which obtain between configurations, macrostructures and microstructures, and colour. Although it is not our intention to analyse the perception of movement, we shall have occasion to observe how significant an influence movement has on the phenomena of colour in connection with the interpenetration of colour and space.

Where do we encounter colours ? First of all they are certainly to be observed in objects. A paper is white, a leaf is green, coal is black. These are perfectly respectable experiences of colour which present us with no unusual problems. Then further : the sky is grey, the water has a green shimmer, and the air is full of beams of light. Such judgments, too, have to do with colour, and they seem to be perfectly commonplace. They involve the recognition of colours as objective properties, referred to objects in the environment. The attitude which dominates such judgments of colour we shall term the “natural,” and, because of its significance for everyday life, the “ biological ” attitude. It is quite certain that people, with the exception of an insignificant fraction, have never dealt with colours except in this natural-biological way; and animals depart from the biological attitude in their behaviour toward colour even less frequently than do men. Experiences of colour in their natural unbroken meaningfulness arise out of the need for a practical orientation toward the colour-qualities of the surrounding world. If the psychologist is rightly to envisage the problems set for him by the world of colour, he has to accept these tangible realities of the world of perception as his starting-point. It would be a kind of psychological perversion if he were to cast these cases aside, and, instead, begin his study with colour- phenomena which the colour specialist has been able to produce only under the highly artificial conditions of the laboratory. Most people depart from this world without ever having had a chance to look into an expensive spectroscope, and without ever having observed an afterimage as anything other than as something momentarily wrong with the eye. Where is the man who of his own accord would choose the subjective visual grey as an object for observation ? There was a time, nevertheless, when it was primarily such phenomena as these which were accepted as the only visual phenomena really worth studying.

Naturally the psychologist has no right to rest content with the determination and description of colour-im- pressions, and assume that thereby all his work has been completed. That would be too easy. His work must begin with description, but it must also include the attempt to detect relationships between phenomena and underlying physical, physiological and psychophysical processes. The science of to-day is at least as much interested in the genetic problem of “ whence ” as it is in the problem of “ what,” and for that reason full justice must be accorded to the point of view of developmental psychology.

The naïve individual, dominated by the natural attitude, deals with colours as properties of the objects of his environment, not with colours as anything in the nature of subjective experiences. “ In general the individual gives no account of the colour which he has just seen. He never makes colour an object of special consideration, but uses it rather simply as a sign by the aid of which objects are recognized.”¹ This is particularly evident, as one might expect, among primitive people. It was Rivers who discovered the fact that as long as the colours presented have primarily aesthetic value and no practical significance, as in the case of the colours of the sky and of vegetation, primitive people seem to be quite indifferent to them.² The Kaffir language alone has more than twenty-six terms to designate the colour and markings of horned cattle.³ According to Reche the Maori has approximately three thousand separately designated colours which have practical significance for him.¹ In striking agreement with these facts of folk psychology is the observation of Gelb and Goldstein that, in cases of pathological absence of the indicative function of language, the experience of colour undergoes a reversal in the direction of a more concrete type of perception, closer to life and biologically more primitive.²

It is impossible to describe the totality of colour- phenomena without at the same time neglecting all other points of view from which colours might be studied. If one is to accomplish such a task one has to adhere rigorously and exclusively to the descriptive phenomenological point of view. No one ever realized how necessary such a procedure is for scientific precision more clearly than did Hering.³ The modes of appearance of colour in space and the phenomena of illumination stand central in the studies reported in this book. The fact that illumination could in any sense at all be considered an independent psychological problem was not recognized until a phenomeno- logically trained eye was directed toward illumination as an independent phenomenon . So far as the modes of appearance of colour in space are concerned, the student of the psychology of colour has been in the habit of concentrating on the problem of colour alone, and consigning modes of appearance to the tender mercies of the student of space-psychology. And the student of space, on the other hand, has usually been too little interested in colours to accord them the attention they deserve. This hybrid position, in which the problem of “ the modes of appearance of colours in space ” seems to find itself, does not necessarily hold for the present study, since, we shall concern ourselves first of all with this borderland between space and colour.

It would never occur to a writer on the psychology of colour to prove experimentally the validity of such relationships as the grouping of colours on the colour circle, for this system can be grasped only descriptively. In such a connection he is content simply to point to the experiences of colour which everyone of us has. In such cases experimental controls can serve only to render possible a clear presentation of the colour-experiences to which the writer is referring, and their discussion in connection with colour-experiences referred to in other studies. Neither here nor anywhere else can the psychologist produce new phenomena in the strict sense of the term ; what he does is simply to make mental phenomena speak for themselves, and in this way bring them to “ official ” recognition.

All experiments on colour which have not, like animal experiments, a pronouncedly behaviouristic character make some use or other of the medium of language. The interaction between colour-impression and linguistic expression is by no means of such a perfectly harmless character that the experimental results are thereby completely uninfluenced. The influences of language that are actually present are partly of a more or less external nature, partly, however, of a very fundamental kind, such as the relationships which obtain between language on the one hand, and sensation, ideation and thinking on the other. As far as the more external influences are concerned, all the difficulties arise which one encounters anywhere in the use of language. G. E. Müller’s preface to his experiments on galvanic visual sensations is worth rereading in this connection.¹ Recently Jenny König has pointed out that we may speak of significant agreement in the naming of colours only with great reservations.² Such distortions of the perceptual process as those induced by language can be corrected. Another difficulty, however, is more deeply rooted, namely that which is grounded in the unavoidable lack of correspondence between our linguistic resources and the ways in which the perceptual world is apprehended and articulated. It cannot be asserted that the consciousness of this situation is as lively in psychology as one would wish it to be, in view of its possible productivity as a psychological problem in itself. Valuable preliminary research has already been contributed by comparative linguistics. H. Güntert has repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that “ language has played a very significant role in determining the constitution of man’s spiritual world and in shaping his world of sense.”¹ This borderland between sense-perception and linguistics has received particularly striking mention in numerous works of Weisgerber.² Henning in his book on smell gives considerable space to the linguistic factor. A particularly important contribution to the clarification of the relationships between colour-perception and linguistic expression is contained on the analysis by Gelb and Goldstein of the afore-mentioned case of amnesia for colour-names.

§ 2. How COLOURS APPEAR IN SPACE : THE MODES OF APPEARANCE

Film Colours and Surface Colours .—It has always been clear to me that when one looks through the eyepiece of a spectroscope the colours one sees in it have an entirely different mode of appearance from that of other colours, e.g., the colours of the coloured papers which we use so frequently.

The spectral colour of the usual apparatus is generally not localized so precisely at an exactly definable distance as is the colour of a paper. The latter usually appears wherever we see the surface of the paper. The distance of the spectral colour from the eye of the observer can be gauged only with some degree of uncertainty. The absolute distance at which the spectral colour is presented is not to be held responsible for its peculiar mode of appearance. In the apparatus which I used (Asher’s spectrometer) the distance at which the colours appeared varied according to the observer’s estimate from 50 cm. to 80 cm. Now coloured papers can be presented at smaller or at greater distances without being thereby made to look like spectral colours. The variation which we observe in spectral colours with respect to ease of localization is connected in general with a certain spongy texture which they evince, whereas in the case of the colour of a paper we can speak of a greater compactness of the colour base. The paper has a surface in which the colour lies. The plane in which the spectral colour is extended in space before the observer does not in the same sense possess a surface. One feels that one can penetrate more or less deeply into the spectral colour, whereas when one looks at the colour of a paper the surface presents a barrier beyond which the eye cannot pass. It is as though the colour of the paper offered resistance to the eye. We have here a phenomenon of visual resistance which in its way contributes to the structure of the perceptual world as something existing in actuality.¹ The spongy texture of the spectral colour is not of such a nature that it could be referred to as a voluminousness or as a colour -transparency. Rather, a spectral colour has this much in common with the colour of a paper, that it is extended through space in the form of a bi-dimensional plane, and functions as a rear boundary for it. The delimitation of space takes place differently for the two types of colour. A spectral colour never loses an essentially frontal-parallel character. When the colour fixated is directly before the eyes, and projected on the fovea, the plane in which it is seen always presents an orientation essentially perpendicular to the direction of vision. The colour of a paper, on the other hand, can assume any orientation whatsoever with reference to the direction of vision, for its plane is always that of the surface of the coloured paper. If it appears in frontal- parallel orientation, this is to be considered simply as a special case. We shall distinguish between these two opposed types of colour-impression on the basis of their common and differentiating factors by characterizing spectral colours, and all the colours which share their mode of appearance, as film colours and the opposite type as surface colours . Surface colours are seen almost solely on objects, so that it might not be out of place to speak of them as “ object colours.”¹ In some cases, however, this term might be misleading. Thus we tend to consider the redness of a red glass or of a red liquid as an object colour, belonging to the object, whereas this red does not possess the character of a surface colour, but presents rather the mode of appearance which we shall characterize below as voluminousness .² On the other hand, surface colours do not appear only on objects; they may be seen, for instance, on clouds of smoke or steam which stand out in clear relief, and we should be doing violence to common usage if we were to refer to these clouds of smoke or steam as objects.

Most naturally or artificially coloured objects, such as wood, paper, stone or cloth, awaken under ordinary conditions the impression of surface colour. By far the most common setting for this type of impression is when light is reflected diffusely from dull-surfaced objects, for as a rule it is only solidly s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the English Edition
• From the Preface to the Second German Edition
• Glossary
• List of Abbreviations for Some of the Works Cited
• Part I Modes of Appearance of Colour and the Phenomenology of Illumination
• Part II Film Colours
• Part III Surface Colours
• Part IV Transparent and Translucent Colours
• Part V Light as Space-Determiner
• Part VI Colour-Constancy and Colour-Contrast
• Part VII Measures of the Perception of Illumination
• Part VIII Colour-Constancy and the Problem of Development
• Part IX Theories of Colour-Constancy
• Index of Authors
• Index