Cognition and Color Reading Group (Winter 2009)


Ground Rules: Participants can volunteer to lead weekly discussions of published articles. Choice of article is up to the discussion leader, and could include any of those listed below, or any other article focusing on higher-order aspects of color processing (featuring front-end processing issues only when they bear on phenomenology, please). Ideally discussion leaders assume the usual responsibility of summarizing the key findings and the points of interest of an article, and bring in any relevant new results from the literature that bear on the study.

Meeting Time and Place: Time is every Friday from Noon till 1:00 (we have the room reserved till 1:30, but most people will probably want to limit it to a one-hour slot). Place is SSPA 2142, which is the small seminar room across from Kim Romney's office.

Choosing a Date to Lead Discussion: Email Kimberly (kjameson@uci.edu) to schedule a discussion date and choose an article. Article links provided below indicate unassigned dates (as "Open") which will be updated as the schedule fills up.


Please encourage others (students, faculty, etc.) to attend who might find this interesting -- The more, the merrier.


Click here to email the Cognition and Color Reading Group list



No Meeting January 9th.


Download .pdf file for January 16th meeting (Kimberly):

Some new simulation results modeling how observer perceptual variation may affect shared color categories:

Jameson, K.A. & Komarova, N.L., (2008). Evolutionary Models of Color Categorization: Investigations Based on Realistic Population Heterogeneity. Technical Report Series MBS 08-04. Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, University of California at Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA.

Extra background .pdf file for Kimberly's discussion:

Komarova, N. L. & Jameson, K.A. (2008). Population Heterogeneity and Color Stimulus Heterogeneity in Agent-based Color Categorization. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 253, 680-700.

Extra background .pdf file for Kimberly's discussion:

Komarova, N.L., Jameson, K.A., & Narens, L. (2007). Evolutionary Models of Color Categorization based on Discriminat ion. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 51. 359-382.


Download .pdf file for January 23rd meeting (Alissa Winkler, Cognitve Sciences, UCI)

A discussion of in-progress results showing individual differences in the interaction between hue and spatial frequency.

Winkler, A., Chubb, C. & Wright, T. (in progress). Synopsis: Individual Differences in Perceived Equiluminance. 2009.


No Meeting January 30th.


Download .pdf file for February 6th meeting (Kimberly)

Topic Description: A survey (of sorts) of L:M cone ratio results and their relation to photopigment phenotypes and color perception.

Miyahara, E., Pokorny, J., Smith, V. C., Baron, R. & Baron E. (1998). Color vision in two observers with highly biased LWS/MWS cone ratios. Vision Research, 38, 601-612.


Download .pdf file for February 13th meeting (Kimberly)

Continuation of our survey of L:M cone ratio r esults and their relation to photopigment phenotypes and color perception.

Jordan, G. & Mollon, J.D. (1993) A study of women heterozygous for colour deficiencies. Vision Research, 33, 1495-1508.

Download supplemental .pdf files for the genotype/phenotype discussion (not required reading, but worth having if you want an argument that the genetic variation in opsin genes may be something other than random mutation):

Verrelli BC, Tishkoff SA. 2004. Signatures of selection and gene conversion associated with human color vision variation. Am J Hum Genet. 75:363–375.

Download supplemental .pdf files for the genotype/phenotype discussion (not required reading, but another useful article about the variation across species and selective pressures underlying the gene conversion idea):

Brain C. Verrelli, Cecil M. Lewis Jr, Anne C. Stone, and George H. Perry . (2008). Different Selective Pressures Shape the Molecular Evolution of Color Vision in Chimpanzee and Human Populations. Mol. Biol. Evol. 25, :2735-2743.


No meeting on February 20th.


Download .pdf file for February 27th meeting (Kimberly)

Discussion of color percepts possibly arising from scotopic and mesopic mechanisms ...

Pokorny, Lutze, Cao, & Zele. (2006). The color of night: Surface color perception under dim illuminations. Visual Neuroscience 23: 525-530.

Extra background .pdf file for Kimberly's discussion:

Reitner, A., Sharpe, L. T., & Zrenner, E. (1991). Is colour vision possible with only rods and blue-sensitive cones? Nature, 352, 798-800.


Download .pdf file for March 6th meeting (Wayne):

Discussion of ongoing work modeling surface reflectance properties of stimuli that are relevant to human color appearance processing ....

Wright, W. (2009). Developing an account of colors as statistical constructs. Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, UCI. Feb. 12, 2009.


No meeting on March 13th. Conference on “HUMAN AND MACHINE LEARNING” IMBS, UCI.


Download .pdf file for March 20th meeting (Donald MacLeod, Psychology, UCSD):

The pleistochrome model of color space ...

MacLeod, D.I.A. (2003). Colour Discrimination, Colour Constancy, and Natural Scene Statistics (The Verriest Lecture). In Normal and Defective Colour Vision, eds. Mollon, J.D., Pokorny, J. and Knoblauch, K. London: Oxford University Press.


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