Source: Laboratory of Jonathan Flombaum—Johns Hopkins University

Human color vision is impressive. People with normal color vision can tell apart millions of individual hues. Most amazingly, this ability is achieved with fairly simple hardware.

Part of the power of human color vision comes from a clever bit of engineering in the human brain. There, color perception relies on what is known as an 'opponent system.' This means that the presence of one kind of stimulus is treated as evidence for the absence of another, and vice versa; absence of one kind of stimulus is taken as evidence for the presence of the other. In particular, in the human brain there are cells that fire both when they receive signals to suggest that blue light is present, or when they do not receive signals suggesting yellow light. Similarly, there are cells that fire in the presence of yellow or the absence of blue. Blue and yellow are thus treated as opponent values in one dimension, and can be thought of as negative versus positive values on one axis of a Cartesian plane. If a stimulus is characterized as having a negative value on that axis, it can't also have a positive value. So, if it is characterized as yellow, it can't also be characterized as blue. Similarly, green and red (or really, magenta), occupy another opponent dimension. There are cells in the human brain that respond to the presence of one or the absence of the other. Figures 1 and 2 explain color opponency in Cartesian terms.

Figure 1. Opponent color dimensions. The human brain processes color using an opponent dimensions system. This is a two-dimensional plane with blue and yellow occupying one axis, which can be thought of as simply positive or negative, and red and green occupying the other axis. The consequence of the system is that the brain processes the presence of some colors as indicating the absence of others, and vice-versa. All perceivable colors occupy a point in the opponent space.

Figure 2. All perceivable colors occupy a point in the opponent space. Shown here are examples of colors that have nonzero values in each of two dimensions of the opponent space.

One way that color opponency was discovered-in 1878 by Ewald Hering, even before scientists had access to techniques for imaging the brain itself-is through an illusion known as a color afterimage. Afterimages are still used today both to demonstrate the opponent properties of human color perception and to study them.

This video demonstrates how to create a color afterimage illusion, and a simple way to collect subjective perceptual responses from human observers.