Sitting in the Huck Life Sciences building today, I looked out the window at a very beautiful Penn State campus. But beyond that, I saw endless mountains of colorful trees, a bright blue sky, and rainbow leaves on the ground. I started wondering what makes this wonderful world of ours appear so beautifully colorful.

According to Craig F. Bohren, there are two ways that white light can be transformed. One way is absorption, which transforms light into other forms of energy. The other way is scattering, which redirects the light. Three different derivatives of scattering include: reflection, refraction, and diffraction. In scattering, the color perceived depends on the different sizes of the particle. Bohren explains the blue of the sky by “selective scattering by molecules.” However, he also mentions that the sky is not uniformly blue. Evidently the sky is a result of multiple scattering.

In the “Journal of Mind and Behavior,” Carl Ratner introduces a different view on color perception. Ratner disagrees with the naturalistic experiments of color perception. He notices a trend among color experiments in cultural variations. This leads him to believe that color perception has a sociohistorical psychological explanation.

This theory, however does not make much sense to me. If this was the case…that color perception is due to sociohistorical psychological reasons rather than biological reasons, what would explain the following experiment?

In an experiment performed by Robert L. Goldstone, the participants were asked to examine a picture of an object, and while the object was shown, they were to attempt to reproduce the color. The shape of the object did not matter, but it was established that the shape actually had an impact on the accuracy of the color reproduction by the participants. Goldstone says that, “objects that belonged to categories with redder objects were judged to be more red than identically colored objects belonging to another category.” Goldstone concluded that there was indeed a category-level influence on color perception of the participants.

If this is so, how could sociohistorical psychological reasons explain it? It is likely they cannot. Color perception tends to lean towards a biological explanation.

This video explains how we perceive light:

This describes color perception only as something that occurs biologically.

So what does this mean?

• Two ways that white light can be transformed are absorption and scattering.
• Color perception might have to deal slightly with sociohistorical psychological explanations.
• There is a category-level influence on color perception.
• Color perception is due to the cones and rods in our eyes.

It’s a bright, colorful world out there, so stop reading this blog post and go see it.