Lightness and colour perception

Sunčica Zdravković, University of Novi Sad

Information input from the environment is the foundation of our mental representations, and the sense we rely on the most to provide us with useful and reliable information is vision. Of all the gathered information, those about colour are of special evolutionary importance and cannot be obtained with any other sense. Perceiving colour is not only a very easy mental task, but it often seems inevitable – awareness of colour imposes itself. Colours are further classified, associated with language, and memorised. However, colour perception is an intricate task, and the algorithms that the brain uses to translate the gathered information into our conscious perception are complex. In our experiments, we reduce this complexity by studying the colour dimensions separately. Lightness, one of the three colour dimensions, clearly demonstrates all important phenomena, from constancy to illusions, in tasks ranging from psychophysics to complicated visual searches, and where both broad-based theories and specific computational models have been developed. The knowledge acquired in this area informs us not only about the perception of lightness and colour, but also of the general way the visual-cognitive system generates mental representations to conceive the outside world that initially provided sensory input.

Sunčica Zdravković graduated from the University of Belgrade, and received her doctorate from Rutgers University in the USA in 2002. Her research interests focus on visual perception, primarily the perception of color and brightness, but also of more complex objects such as sets and faces. In her research, she uses psychophysical methods as well as recording of eye movements. She is a full Professor at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia, teaching perception, cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. as wll as courses at the school of Electrical Engineering and School of Industrial Design. As an Affiliate Professor at the University of Malta she contributes to both teaching and supervision on the MSc. in Cognitive Science. She is a head of the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at the Department of Psychology in Novi Sad but her research is also partially carried out in the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology in Belgrade.