Abstract

Perceiving colors of a surface plays an important role on the percept of an object. I investigated the characteristic of human color information processing by examining the effect of the surrounding distractor colors on the perception of target color in several color search tasks. Experiment 1, in which the search performance for a primary color among single-color distractors or vice versa was investigated, revealed an early parallel processing property of color information with objects' orientation and shape. However, when two primary colors or two-color distractor mixtures were included in experiment 2, the results showed a parallel search pattern in searching primary colors among color distracter mixtures but a serial search pattern in searching color mixtures among primary colors. These results indicate that processing for primary colors is more efficient than that for color mixtures under a certain circumstance. I further investigated effects of adjacent surrounding colors on the detection of target color in Experiment 3. Again, We found that serarching for a primary color among color mixtures was more efficient than searching for a mixture color among primary colors.