ReviewTrends in cognitive sciences2023
Color appearance and the end of Hering's Opponent-Colors Theory.
Review in Trends in cognitive sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Do we feel colours? A systematic review of 128 years of psychological research linking colours and emotions.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Pooled it
- Synaptic Organization of the Primate Retina: Toward a Human Foveal Connectome.Annual review of vision science · 2026Review
- Gray Anchoring: A New Computational Theory for Biological Color Constancy.Neuroscience bulletin · 2026Article
- Wavelength-dependent feedback behavior in light-gated polymersome nanoreactors.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Filter, Detector, Predictor: The expanding repertoire of retinal computation in vertebrates.Vision research · 2026Review
- Emergent neuronal mechanisms mediating covert attention in convolutional neural networks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The non-opponent nature of colour afterimages.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Achromatic loci in normal and anomalous trichromats.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
- Human and primate categorical understanding of color.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The origin of color categories.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Colorimetry characteristics and color clustering of natural gem-quality spinel from Myanmar (Burma).PloS one · 2025Article
- A circuit motif for color in the human foveal retina.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Unique yellow shifts for small and brief stimuli in the central retina.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- Cone-Opponent Ganglion Cells in the Primate Fovea Tuned to Noncardinal Color Directions.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Temporal and spatial analysis of event-related potentials in response to color saliency differences among various color vision types.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Hering's Opponent-Colors Theory has been central to understanding color appearance for 150 years. It aims to explain the phenomenology of colors with two linked propositions. First, a psychological hypothesis stipulates that any color is described necessarily and sufficiently by the extent to which it appears reddish-versus-greenish, bluish-versus-yellowish, and blackish-versus-whitish. Second, a physiological hypothesis stipulates that these perceptual mechanisms are encoded by three innate brain mechanisms. We review the evidence and conclude that neither side of the linking proposition is accurate: the theory is wrong. We sketch out an alternative, Utility-Based Coding, by which the known retinal cone-opponent mechanisms represent optimal encoding of spectral information given competing selective pressure to extract high-acuity spatial information; and phenomenological color categories represent an adaptive, efficient, output of the brain governed by behavioral demands.
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