Colour Appearance of Surfaces as Affected by Different Time-Varying Colour-Adaptation Sequences

We report on experiments in which observers judged colour appearance within the context of time-varying colour adaptation. We used pairs of contextual images consisting of a rapid succession of colour surfaces reproduced under different illuminants to analyse the effect of temporal colour adaptation rather than a spatial context on asymmetric matching and also to judge its influence upon the cone excitation components. We used adaptation colour distributions along the red-green and yellow-blue axes (selective conditions) and random colour distributions (non-selective condition). The results of observers’ matches for both conditions showed approximate colour-constant appearance. Although light adaptation did not fully compensate the colour changes, we obtained average colour-constancy index values of 0.6. The results for the two opponent conditions showed similar contextual effects. No significant differences between each condition were found for the L- and S-cone mechanisms and the three test illuminants. On the contrary, some degree of interaction between the comparison-field cone excitations and the colour axis can be seen when the colour mechanisms are analysed separately. This seems to be more pronounced for the S-cone mechanism and suggests that the selective condition of the adaptation sequence may well affect the observer’s chromatic matching response.