Abstract

We studied hue cancellation on adapting fields whose color appearance was altered using binocular fusion. Test stimuli were mixtures of red and green light that were either increments of decrements superimposed on an adapting back ground in one eye. The observer’s task was to set a red-green equilibrium ratio for each magnitude of increment or decrement. Monocular adapting fields appeared red, orange, yellow, yellow–green or green, and fused binocular fields appeared either yellow, orange, or yellow–green because of green or red contralateral fields. Hue-cancellation functions were found to depend on the color appearance of the adapting field. We found differences in the slopes of the linear functions describing cancellations for increments and decrements, and differences in slopes between binocular conditions and their monocular control conditions. We also found small but consistent changes in the intercepts of these linear functions. Results relate to two-process models of color vision. The slope changes reflect gain changes that must be centrally rather than retinally controlled. The different slopes for increments and decrements implies differential gains mediated by the putative central mechanism and related to color appearance. Intercept changes are related to simultaneous color contrast effects and failures of color constancy.

© 1991 Optical Society of America