DISCUSS AND EXPLAIN THE TRICHROMATIC THEORY AND THE OPPONENT-PROCESSING THEORY BY EMPHASIZING ON THE SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES.
“How do our eyes and brain allow us to perceive colors?”
To begin with, Color vision is the capacity of an organism to distinguish objects. Many scientists have asked the mentioned above question and hence they have put forward two theories to explain the process of color vision. These two theories were known as The Trichromatic Theory of Vision and The Opponent-Processing Theory of Vision. These two theories deal with how color vision is achieved and how we see color. They explain and guide research on color vision. Being complementary, they both explain processes that operate at different level of the visual system.
The Trichromatic Theory of Color was first proposed by Thomas Young, an 18th Century English physician and physicist, in 1801. The proposal said that the eye could perceive light by three-color sensitive receptors arrayed along the inner wall of the eye, that is, the retina. This theory explains the condition of processing three independent channels for conveying color information, derived from the three-color sensitive receptors which were part of the cells known as Cones. Hermann von Helmholtz, a German physician and physicist, showed that normal vision does require three wavelengths of light to create a normal range of colors. These three types of photosensitive cells each contain a pigment that is sensitive to a different wavelength of light, long or red cones, medium or green cones, short or blue cones. These color receptors have different absorption spectra and can then be combined to form any visible color in the spectrum.
Moreover, the underlying premise of the original theory is that it is possible to create all colors of the spectrum by mixing two primary colors. Helmholtz used color-matching experiments where participants would alter the amounts of three different wavelengths of light to