Research project: What are Complementary Colours?

The idea of complementary colours is the cradle of colour sciences and central to arts and industry. They are presented in textbooks and introductory lectures on visual perception assuming that they correspond to afterimages, contrast induction, and colour opponency. Yet, there is reason to doubt that these phenomena are based on the same perceptual mechanisms. In this project, we measure and model complementarity in different phenomena to clarify the mechanisms at play in these fundamental processes of colour perception.

Principal investigator: Dr Christoph Witzel