Abstract

We studied how much desaturating color had to be added to blue or red in order to perceive complementary color, i.e., yellow or blue–green, respectively. Thresholds were measured in an eye preadapted to blue or red at eccentricities of 0–15° in the nasal visual field. The CIE chromaticity coordinates of blue or red were subtracted from the chromaticity coordinates corresponding to the complementary color thresholds to obtain the threshold differences (dx, dy) in chromaticity coordinates. With constant stimulus size, dx and dy decreased for both colors when eccentricity increased, indicating that thresholds decreased with increasing eccentricity for a constant size stimulus. When the stimulus was M-scaled by reducing its size toward the fovea in inverse proportion to ganglion-cell sampling density, dx and dy were independent of eccentricity for blue, except in the fovea, where more desaturating color was needed. For red color, M-scaling failed to make dx and dy independent of eccentricity at any eccentricity tested.

© 1990 Optical Society of America