Our ability to see the full color spectrum of visible light evolved about 35 million years ago, and it gives us a unique perspective on the world compared with most other mammals. The evolutionary advantage of color vision may stem from the ability to spot food or predators from long distances, but the ability to see the world in color confers much more than that. Seeing the beauty of the world with trichromatic vision has given us great artworks and is a fundamental part of the human experience for people with healthy vision. Is the blue that one person perceives the same as the blue that somebody else sees? How does the perception of color enrich our emotional lives? Is color a property of the world around us or a creation by our brains? These are longstanding questions at the border of philosophy and neuroscience, which continue to fascinate researchers around the world. A study that the journal PNAS recently published reports on an exciting new investigation of color vision, asking the question: How much color do we really see? As there is no known anatomical limit at this range, the results indicate that even when people are actively looking for color changes in the periphery, they tend to miss them. This research demonstrates that people can improve their sensitivity to color in the periphery of their vision by paying attention. However, overall, the findings suggest that most people’s color awareness is limited to a relatively small area at the center of their visual field. The brain fills in the rest, the authors say, based on predictions of which colors are most likely to be present.
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