Perceiving colour

Understanding the perception of colour is made especially challenging by the peculiar phenomenology of colour contrast and constancy effects. The first systematic account of colour contrast was published in 1839 by the French chemist Michel Chevreul. This current paper reviews the nature of colour vision, the problems that the observations of Chevreul and others present for colour science, and recent work that suggests a solution. They show that the perceptual effects apparent in both colour contrast and constancy, as well as colour perception in the absence of strongly influential contexts, can all be rationalised in terms of a strategy that generates chromatic percepts according to what the inherently ambiguous spectral stimuli have actually signified in the past experience of the individual and the species.