Lumpy Color Spaces

I read these blogs a few days ago and then gave them a few days to see what floated up throughout the next couple of days. The first thing that struck me and kept coming back was the asymmetry of our perceptual color space.

One side of this is the fact that "objectively uniform" adjustments to color values, such as changing the hue or saturation by the same unit, are not necessarily perceived as linear transitions. As Simmons writes, our perceptual color space is "lumpy," when describing the shape of the NASA AMES color tool.

I used to take sketching classes and my teacher used to say that our heightened sensitivity to greens is due to the fact that green is the inverse of red and we are sensitive to red because of its resemblance to blood.

His explanation wasn't exactly accurate (doesn't account for why green is actually more sensitive than red, or what this "inverse of" means in terms of our rods and cones), but I do think it is interesting to think about how these asymmetries in our perception are rooted in some sort of "biological heuristic," honed over time to maximally identify things most important to the human species.

Knowing this, I think, can really inform color choices in information visualization -- by knowing what our perceptual systems are calibrated to notice (or not notice), we can truly develop effective interpretive systems that function in collaboration with our perceptual biases.