Memory color of natural familiar objects: effects of surface texture and 3-D shape.

Natural objects typically possess characteristic contours, chromatic surface textures, and three-dimensional shapes. These diagnostic features aid object recognition, as does memory color, the color most associated in memory with a particular object. Here we aim to determine whether polychromatic surface texture, 3-D shape, and contour diagnosticity improve memory color for familiar objects, separately and in combination.

Biological components of colour preference in infancy.

Adult colour preference has been summarized quantitatively in terms of weights on the two fundamental neural processes that underlie early colour encoding: the S-(L+M) ('blue-yellow') and L-M ('red-green') cone-opponent contrast channels (Ling, Hurlbert & Robinson, 2006; Hurlbert & Ling, 2007). Here, we investigate whether colour preference in 4-5-month-olds may be analysed in the same way. We recorded infants' eye-movements in response to pairwise presentations of eight colour stimuli varying only in hue.

Role of color memory in successive color constancy.

We investigate color constancy for real 2D paper samples using a successive matching paradigm in which the observer memorizes a reference surface color under neutral illumination and after a temporal interval selects a matching test surface under the same or different illumination. We find significant effects of the illumination, reference surface, and their interaction on the matching error. We characterize the matching error in the absence of illumination change as the "pure color memory shift" and introduce a new index for successive color constancy that compares this shift against the matching error under changing illumination.

Color and size interactions in a real 3D object similarity task.

In the natural world, objects are characterized by a variety of attributes, including color and shape. The contributions of these two attributes to object recognition are typically studied independently of each other, yet they are likely to interact in natural tasks. Here we examine whether color and size (a component of shape) interact in a real three-dimensional (3D) object similarity task, using solid domelike objects whose distinct apparent surface colors are independently controlled via spatially restricted illumination from a data projector hidden to the observer.