Seeing Black and White

Oxford Psychology

by Alan L. Gilchrist

How the human visual system determines the lightness of a surface, that is, its whiteness, blackness, or grayness, remains--like vision in general--a mystery. In fact, we have not even been able to create a machine that can determine, through an artificial vision system, whether an object is white, black, or gray. Although the photoreceptors in the eye are driven by light, the light reflected by a surface does not reveal its shade of gray. Depending upon the level of illumination, a surface of any shade of gray can reflect any amount of light.

In Seeing Black and White Alan Gilchrist ties together over 30 years of his own research on lightness, and presents the first comprehensive, historical review of empirical work on lightness, covering the past 150 years of research on images ranging from the simple to the complex. He also describes and analyzes the many theories of lightness--including his own--showing what each can and cannot explain. Gilchrist highlights the forgotten-yet-exciting work done in the first third of the twentieth century, describing several crucial experiments and examining the brilliant but nearly unknown work of the Hungarian gestalt theorist, Lajos Kardos.

Gilchrists review also includes a survey of the pattern of lightness errors made by humans, many of which result in delightful illusions. He argues that because these errors are not random, but systematic, they are the signature of our visual software, and so provide a powerful tool that can reveal how lightness is computed. Based on this argument and the concepts of anchoring, grouping, and frames of reference, Gilchrist presents a new theoretical framework that explains an unprecedented array of lightness errors. As both the first comprehensive overview of research on lightness and the first unified presentation of Gilchrists new theoretical framework Seeing Black and White will be an invaluable resource for vision scientists, cognitive psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists.

448 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Alan Gilchrist is a Professor in the Faculty of Psychology at Rutgers University in the USA.

"I study visual perception, especially the perception of surface color, and especially the black-white dimension. Vision is known to be based on the image projected onto the retina, but the problem of how to assign black, white and gray values to surfaces represented in that image remains unsolved, in human vision as in computer vision. Because of variations in many factors such as the background of a surface and the lighting conditions, the perception of any one specific surface color can be associated with many patterns of local stimulation at the retina. The goal of the work is to describe the software (not the hardware, or wetware) used by the visual system to decode the retinal image. The primary method is psychophysics. Naive observers are exposed to displays specially constructed so that competing theories make opposing predictions of what observers will see. The observer reports, typically involving matches made using a color chart, are then used to evaluate theories. In my lab we have approached this problem in two ways. In earlier work, an inverse-optics approach was taken in which we attempted to determine the computations necessary to recover objective properties like surface color. More recent work has focused on the pattern of errors shown by human observers when judging surface colors. These errors are systematic, not random, and the work is based on the assumption that the pattern of errors is the signature of the software used to decode the retinal image."