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  • A visitor interacts with the Disagreeing About Color exhibit.
  • Disagreeing About Color exhibit.
  • Can you believe your eyes?

  • A visitor interacts with the Disagreeing About Color exhibit.
  • Disagreeing About Color exhibit.
  • Paul Doherty at Disagreeing About Color

Disagreeing About Color

Color is in the eye of the beholder.

Which of the outer dots best matches the center dot? Ask a few people and chances are you’ll get a few different answers.


Where:   Bechtel Gallery 3: Seeing & Reflections
Exhibit Developers:   Richard O. Brown and Pete Stephens, 2002

What’s going on?

The center dot at this exhibit is pure yellow light. It’s surrounded by a ring of 11 dots of varying colors, created by mixing different proportions of red and green light. (Surprise: Red and green light mixed together appear yellow to our eyes.)

Exactly which of the red/green dots seems to best match the yellow dot varies from person to person. Thanks to variations in the pigments of our retinas, people perceive color differently. One person will see a match between colors that another person thinks are very different.

 

Going further

Variations between people in their perception of color reach an extreme in color blindness. About 1 in every 12 men (and 1 in every 200 women) are colorblind, the common name for a condition more correctly called color deficiency.

Unlike ordinary human trichomats, who have three types of color-sensitive cones, most color-deficient people are dichromats, having only two types of color-sensitive cones, one most sensitive to blue light, the other to yellow light. The upshot is that colorblind people see the world in shades of blue and yellow—with red and green being especially hard to tell apart.

 
Phenomena: Color, Color Mixing, Judgment
Keywords: eyes
Aliases: Compare Yellow (LEDs), Disagreement About Color, Two Ways of Seeing Yellow
Collections: Colorfest, Seeing

More to explore

Paul Doherty at Disagreeing About Color

Can you believe your eyes?

Science activity investigating spectroscopy
CD Spectroscope

Turn an old CD into a spectroscope to analyze light.

Color Vision and Color Photography
Explore the past and present of color vision.
Muddy Waters

by Eileen Campbell • February 15, 2017

Winter rains muddy the waters in the Bay.

Related exhibits

Bright Black
Bright Black

Can you tell the difference between black and white?

Color of Water
Color of Water

The color of the water changes. What’s affecting it today?

Gray Step
Gray Step

Your visual system uses edges to detect differences.

Bird in a Cage
Bird in a Cage

When your eyes adapt to color, you can see things that aren’t really there.


IMLS acknowledgment

This web project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services [MA-30-16-0175-16].

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