As soon as we cast our eyes over a scene, we experience it as a full-color vista. The idea that we could look at something and not notice what color it was is a strange one.
But an interesting new study from researchers Michael A. Cohen and Jordan Rubenstein suggests that our vision contains less color information than you’d think.
Cohen and Rubenstein found that a large proportion of people failed to spot that an image contained major color distortions in their peripheral vision.
The participants, all of whom had normal vision, were shown a series of images. Their task was to focus on the center of each picture and look out for a certain feature of the image (either human faces, or indoor vs. outdoor scenes). Each picture was shown for 288 milliseconds.
The trick was that the final image in each series was sometimes distorted. Sometimes, the colors ...
