Abstract

By means of monolexemic color naming of the 424 primary samples of the OSA Uniform Color Scales set, it is possible to establish the centroid location in that space of the eleven basic surface colors originally described by Berlin and Kay. For normals, this results in a meaningful 3-D configuration of the centroids of categorically distinct col­ors. An extension of this work with dichromat viewing fields subtending ~3° produced a configuration of centroids remarkably similar to that of normal controls, it was hypothesized that the di­chromatic observers might be using information derived from rod excitation to supplement their remaining yellow-blue color discrimination. By the use of foveally fixated small fields or bleaching of the rods, this hypothesis was confirmed by a collapse of the 3-D array of centroids into a plane defined by yellow-blue and lightness variations.

© 1986 Optical Society of America