Colour for Behavioural Success

Abstract

Colour information not only helps sustain the survival of animal species by guiding sexual selection and foraging behaviour but also is an important factor in the cultural and technological development of our own species. This is illustrated by examples from the visual arts and from state-of-the-art imaging technology, where the strategic use of colour has become a powerful tool for guiding the planning and execution of interventional procedures. The functional role of colour information in terms of its potential benefits to behavioural success across the species is addressed in the introduction here to clarify why colour perception may have evolved to generate behavioural success. It is argued that evolutionary and environmental pressures influence not only colour trait production in the different species but also their ability to process and exploit colour information for goal-specific purposes. We then leap straight to the human primate with insight from current research on the facilitating role of colour cues on performance training with precision technology for image-guided surgical planning and intervention. It is shown that local colour cues in two-dimensional images generated by a surgical fisheye camera help individuals become more precise rapidly across a limited number of trial sets in simulator training for specific manual gestures with a tool. This facilitating effect of a local colour cue on performance evolution in a video-controlled simulator (pick-and-place) task can be explained in terms of colour-based figure-ground segregation facilitating attention to local image parts when more than two layers of subjective surface depth are present, as in all natural and surgical images.

Combining Visual Contrast Information with Sound Can Produce Faster Decisions

“…It is shown that stronger contrasts combined with higher sound frequencies led to faster perceptual decisions [17,18]. This facilitating effect of sound frequency on response times for "nearer" was consistently stronger in the positively signed, light-on-dark, contrast configurations, as predicted by functional asymmetries between the "on" and "off" contrast processing channels of the visual brain [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][30][31][32]. Moreover, as the number of contrast elements in the 2D patterns increased, the effect of sound on response times also increased statistically, regardless of the contrast sign of the patterns, as predicted by spatial probability summation in the "on" and "off" contrast processing channels of the visual brain.…”

“…Positively signed light-on-dark pattern pairs (Figure 3, graphs on left) produced shorter response times in comparison with negatively signed dark-on-light pattern pairs (Figure 3, graphs on right), despite the fact that the pattern pairs with negative contrast sign displayed moderately stronger differences in visual contrast (dC) between patterns in a pair. This effect of contrast polarity was statistically significant (Table 2), which is explained by the well-documented functional asymmetry between the so-called "on" and "off" contrast processing channels in the human brain [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][30][31][32]. One of the perceptual consequences of this functional asymmetry is that positively signed contrast configurations, processed by the "on" channels of the visual brain, produce stronger effects of figure-ground segregation [24] and relative depth [17], with shorter perceptual decision times, as confirmed by results here.…”

“…Information 2018, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 7 of 11 "on" and "off" contrast processing channels in the human brain [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][30][31][32]. One of the perceptual consequences of this functional asymmetry is that positively signed contrast configurations, processed by the "on" channels of the visual brain, produce stronger effects of figure-ground segregation [24] and relative depth [17], with shorter perceptual decision times, as confirmed by results here.…”

“…The human brain's capacity to exploit combined information of visual contrast and sound in motor response behavior [11] has important implications in the context of a variety of operator tasks and in the context of human-computer interaction systems where optimal motor performance is critical [12][13][14]. The goal of this study here was to bring to the forefront the ability of individuals to effectively use visual contrast and sound for making faster perceptual decisions by taking into account the well-documented capacity of the human perceptual system to extract subjective cues of relative depth from planar (2D) object configurations on the basis of physical variations in luminance contrast [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. As shown previously, in 2D configurations with higher-contrast and lower-contrast visual objects, those with the higher contrast will be consistently perceived as "nearer" by human observers.…”

“…In addition, the sound frequency factor was varied here to show that, in the light of Chocholle's seminal work [7], stronger contrasts combined with higher sound frequencies preceding the contrast stimulus will produce even faster forced-choice decisions, in further consistency with probability summation. The contrast factor here was varied in the context of perceptual decisions for "nearer" in response to the stronger one of two simultaneously presented image configurations [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. The investigation takes into account that identical sounds in terms of physical intensity (dB) with higher frequencies have a higher average energy for any given section of the sound wave compared with lower frequency sounds.…”