title: Salience of unique hues and implications for color theory.
abstract: The unique hues--blue, green, yellow, red--form the fundamental dimensions of opponent-color theories, are considered universal across languages, and provide useful mental representations for structuring color percepts. However, there is no neural evidence for them from neurophysiology or low-level psychophysics. Tapping a higher prelinguistic perceptual level, we tested whether unique hues are particularly salient in search tasks. We found no advantage for unique hues over their nonunique complementary colors. However, yellowish targets were detected faster, more accurately, and with fewer saccades than their complementary bluish targets (including unique blue), while reddish-greenish pairs were not significantly different in salience. Similarly, local field potentials in primate V1 exhibited larger amplitudes and shorter latencies for yellowish versus bluish stimuli, whereas this effect was weaker for reddish versus greenish stimuli. Consequently, color salience is affected more by early neural response asymmetries than by any possible mental or neural representation of unique hues.
authors.affiliation: Graduate Center for Vision Research, State University of New York, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Lauren E
authors.initials: LE
authors.lastname: Wool
authors.affiliation: Graduate Center for Vision Research, State University of New York, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Stanley J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Komban
authors.affiliation: Graduate Center for Vision Research, State University of New York, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Jens
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kremkow
authors.affiliation: Graduate Center for Vision Research, State University of New York, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Jansen
authors.affiliation: Graduate Center for Vision Research, State University of New York, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Xiaobing
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Graduate Center for Vision Research, State University of New York, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Jose-Manuel
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Alonso
authors.affiliation: Graduate Center for Vision Research, State University of New York, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Qasim
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Zaidi
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D015350:Contrast Sensitivity / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008253:Macaca mulatta; D011601:Psychophysics; D017949:Retinal Cone Photoreceptor Cells / Q000502:physiology*; D012438:Saccades / Q000502:physiology
keywords: color electrophysiology; color perception; color psychophysics; response asymmetry; salience; unique hues; visual search