Our perception of colour changes with seasons

A team of researchers have embarked on a mission to examine how we process the color unique yellow.

Yellow – one of the four unique hues (in addition to blue, green and red) humans perceive as not including other colors – is one the few colors humans across the spectrum agree on.

‘If we integrate it with a contact lens or other wearable electronics, it expands your vision, ‘ Zhong said.

She told MailOnline: “The shift we see in the unique yellow settings in the summer is towards shorter wavelengths – i.e. towards a more “greenish” yellow”.

But yellow stands alone even within the “unique” category. Researchers have begun to discover the reason why unique yellow is extremely stable and how it could be changed together with the natural world’s color. Our vision compensates for those changes and that, surprisingly, changes what we think “yellow” looks like.

The study involved the testing performed on 67 men and women in the months of January and June.

The subjects were guided into a darkened room, given the proper time for their eyes to adjust to the change, then presented with a machine known as a “colorimeter” and asked to adjust the dial forward and backward until they felt that they were looking at a “real yellow” that had no traces of red or green.

The findings are based on the many different measurements that she took of the settings during both seasons.

“In York (U.K.), you typically have grey, boring winters and then in summer you have greenery everywhere”.

Lauren Welbourne, lead author of the new study elucidating this discovery notes: “It’s a bit like changing the color balance on your TV”.

Apparently our perception of color can change from season to season.

“The more we learn about how vision and color in particular is processed, the better we can understand exactly how we see the world”, Welbourne said.

Legally to have found in the note Current Biology proposes that years effect how we feel colorings.

The research offers insight into the complexity of the visual system being an example of how humans adapt to their surroundings constantly. “Think about the changes that the rainy season brings to India, or winter and summer in the arctic”, Welbourne said.

She pointed out that this process is useful because humans can adjust to the huge seasonal changes which occur in the environmental color and still be able to see and distinguish color accurately.