Invariant categorical color regions across illuminant change coincide with focal colors

Abstract

Are there regions in a color space where color categories are invariant across illuminant changes? If so, what characteristics make them more stable than other regions? To address these questions, we asked observers to give a color name to 424 colored surfaces, presented one at a time, under various chromatic illuminants. Results showed a high degree of categorical color constancy, especially under illuminants that occur in the natural environment. It was also shown that surfaces selected as a focal color (the best example of a color category) are more resistant to illuminant change than non-focal color samples. This might imply that categorically invariant regions might have become focal colors to facilitate object identification and communication with others under a variety of lighting environments. We additionally ran an asymmetric color matching experiment to quantify the shift of color appearance induced by illuminant changes using surfaces that were all named gray, thereby disentangling the appearance-based color constancy from the categorical color constancy (which are often confounded). Results suggested that the appearance of color samples largely shifted due to illuminant changes even though all samples were named gray; showing that the constancy of a color category is substantially more robust than the constancy of color appearance.