ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the review of color vision theories and their history, the anatomical, biochemical, and physiological bases of color vision, and brief discussions on methodology, psychophysics, and phylogenetic aspects of color. Color and its appreciation are so important in human perception that hue is often considered a direct physical attribute of an object, much like texture or hardness. The relation between color appearance and stimulus wavelengths is very well known. The implication is that the appearance of a particular color, say red, is physically determined, but this can be very misleading. A theory of color vision is any systematic attempt to explain how color responses are produced and to account for all the well-established facts of color vision such as color mixtures, afterimages, contrast effects, color blindness, and the like. The information about colors passed to the central nervous system is derived from neural processing of cone signals, not from the raw cone signals themselves.
