What’s your favorite color? As a typical elementary school question to determine whether you’re truly compatible with your best friend or not, it always amused me how so many people had different answers. Ever member in my family, as well as my friends seemed to have a specific color they favored. Even at a young age I craved logic and definitive relationships, so I came up with a theory. I determined that we all actually had the same favorite color, but we perceived them differently. The same way that we discussed in class that color is a psychophysical relationship between the physical stimulus and our cognitive perception, I believed that we all had the same physical stimulus but different perceptions. My theory in practice stated that both my sister and I favored the same physical stimulus but societal practice categorized my favorite color as yellow and hers as green. This ideal is similar to our class discussions on color perception in terms of cultural relativism, in which color perception may be determined partly due to our cultural environment. However, has I have grown up and learned more about the biological aspects of color perception I realize that my theory was flawed. At the root of sensational and perceptional psychology is the understanding that specific environmental stimuli interact with certain anatomical structures to produce a specified neurological response. The developed theory of trichromacy has experimentally shown that colors of certain wavelengths interact with specific cone cell photoreceptors meaning that my theory is anatomically not possible. Despite the error in my original childhood theory, there are instances in which color is not uniformly perceived. Colorblindness, as discussed, is an instance in which differences in cone photoreceptors produce different color perception experiences. As proposed in the triochromatic theory, there are three cones (L, M and S) that are involved in color perception, each with a specific wavelength that they maximally respond to. The absence of one type of cone is called color anomalous. This defect is often typical for L and M cones which share a large overlap of perceived wavelengths, resulting in difficulty distinguishing between colors. This type of defect provides the only scientific reasoning for my original theory, as an individual with color anomalous could mislabel a color due to perception. A variety of other colorblind defects exist with the absence of only one cone, which skews color perception. These defects are as follows: deuteranope (absence of M cones, red-green color blind), protanope (absense of L cones, red-green color blind) and tritanope (absense of S cones, blue-yellow colorblind).

If you are interested in experiencing colorblindness, the following links are to colorblindness generators that will vary the images depending upon the absence or presence of cone types.

http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/2.html

http://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/colour-blindness-experience-it/