Environmental Influences on Color Vision

It is evident that color vision evolved to inform organisms about their environment and thus must be shaped by the environment the organism is in. The color properties of the world are a potent factor affecting not only the basic mechanisms of color vision within a species but also how they are calibrated and fine-tuned within the individual. As a result, many aspects of the physiology of color coding and the phenomenology of color experience can be predicted by looking outside the observer – to analyze the signals available in the color environment. The following provides a number of specific examples of how knowledge of the color characteristics of the environment has helped to account for some of the known properties of our color vision.