Lightness and Brightness and Other Confusions

oth for perception of lightness (Gilchrist et al. 1999) and hue (Klarén and
Fridell Anter 2011).
But even if we experience that an object has almost the same colour in a different
light, we can at the same time perceive a slight tone of colour that reveals
the character of the light. For nominally achromatic surfaces this effect
is more obvious than for nominally chromatic surfaces. We experience that
the surface is white but we feel at the same time that it is illuminated with a
light of a special quality and intensity. This involves not only light coming
directly from the light source, but also light reflected from surrounding surfaces.
Depending on modes of attention, a nominally white wall lit by ‘warm’ sunlight
can be seen (with a reflective attitude) as slightly yellowish or (with
living perception) as the “proper” or “real” colour of the wall experienced
beyond the perceived colour. As a suggestion one could call this colour constancy
colour 26 (Fig. 1). (See also Lightness and Brightness and Other Confusions
in this volume).
According to Alva Noë, different kinds of visual appearances can be experienced
simultaneously. Noë gives an example from shape perception: When a
circular plate is held up at an angle, we are able to experience circularity in
what we simultaneously perceive as an elliptical shape. In the same way, we
can experience, say, a white constancy colour in a surface that we simultaneously
perceive as having a hue caused by light. (Noë 2004, pp 131–132).
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Ewald Hering’s concept memory colour (Gedächtnisfarbe) touches on this phenomena,
but confines to expected colours in objects: “What the layman calls the real colour
of an object is a colour of the object that has become fixed, as it were, in his memory; I
should like to call it the memory colour of the object”. Hering (1920). Constancy colour
refers to a natural perceptual ‘skill’; we make ‘hypotheses’ of what the colour is from
perceived visual information in a given context. Merleau-Ponty says that the “real”
colour persists “not as a seen or thought-of quality, but through a non-sensory presence.”
(Merleau-Ponty 2002, p 356). See also Klarén and Fridell Anter, 2011.
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