ArticleJournal of vision2015
What is white?
Article in Journal of vision, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 60 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Gray Anchoring: A New Computational Theory for Biological Color Constancy.Neuroscience bulletin · 2026Article
- More than meets the (human) eye: Cryptic chromatic diversity in a colour polymorphic lizard : Cryptic polymorphism in lacertid lizards.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2026Article
- Effects of color-enhancing filters on color salience in normal trichromats.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Achromatic loci in normal and anomalous trichromats.Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision · 2025Article
- Visual search for warm and cool colors.Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision · 2025Article
- Warm versus cool colors and their relation to color perception.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- The edge orientation entropy of natural scenes is associated with infant visual preferences and adult aesthetic judgements.PloS one · 2025Article
- Effects of visual diet on colour discrimination and preference.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Increasing magnitude of color differences amplifies category effects.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Unique yellow shifts for small and brief stimuli in the central retina.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- Chromatic and spatial image statistics predict infants' visual preferences and adults' aesthetic preferences for art.Journal of vision · 2023Article
- Infant color perception: Insight into perceptual development.Child development perspectives · 2022Article
- Individual Differences in Colour Perception: The Role of Low-Saturated and Complementary Colours in Ambiguous Images.i-Perception · 2021Article
- Color appearance model incorporating contrast adaptation - implications for individual differences in color vision.Color research and application · 2021Article
- Color perception and compensation in color deficiencies assessed with hue scaling.Vision research · 2021Article
- Human color constancy based on the geometry of color distributions.Journal of vision · 2021Article
- Color variance and achromatic settings.Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision · 2020Article
- Plasticity in perception: insights from color vision deficiencies.Faculty reviews · 2020Review
- Individual differences and their implications for color perception.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
To shed light on the perceptual basis of the color white, we measured settings of unique white in a dark surround. We find that settings reliably show more variability in an oblique (blue-yellow) direction in color space than along the cardinal axes of the cone-opponent mechanisms. This is against the idea that white perception arises at the null point of the cone-opponent mechanisms, but one alternative possibility is that it occurs through calibration to the visual environment. We found that the locus of maximum variability in settings lies close to the locus of natural daylights, suggesting that variability may result from uncertainty about the color of the illuminant. We tested this by manipulating uncertainty. First, we altered the extent to which the task was absolute (requiring knowledge of the illumination) or relative. We found no clear effect of this factor on the reduction in sensitivity in the blue-yellow direction. Second, we provided a white surround as a cue to the illumination or left the surround dark. Sensitivity was selectively worse in the blue-yellow direction when the surround was black than when it was white. Our results can be functionally related to the statistics of natural images, where a greater blue-yellow dispersion is characteristic of both reflectances (where anisotropy is weak) and illuminants (where it is very pronounced). Mechanistically, the results could suggest a neural signal responsive to deviations from the blue-yellow locus or an adaptively matched range of contrast response functions for signals that encode different directions in color space.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.