Colour perception across the visual field: No mastery of sensorimotor contingencies [Abstract]

With the growing emphasis on the roles of learning, plasticity, calibration, Bayesian inference and sensorimotor contingencies in vision, many of us take for granted that distortions introduced by the eye should not be expected to affect the world we perceive. For example, light reaching the centre of our eyes will differ in spectrum from light falling 2 degrees away, but in everyday life uniformly coloured surfaces do not seem to gradually vary in colour with eccentricity, nor do objects seem to change colour whether we look directly at them or not. Indeed, this very example explicitly inspired O’Regan and Noe’s influential “sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness”. Alas, this prediction is compromised by (overlooked) evidence that such spectral variation does affect colour perception when measured in controlled laboratory conditions. We replicated this finding in settings closer to natural experience (i) with eye movements, (ii) with real surfaces, and we modelled cone responses to the spectra of our stimuli. We show that, despite centre–periphery variations being very systematic on everyday surfaces, perceptual judgments reflect plain receptoral adaptation but no learning. We conclude that there is no mastery of sensorimotor contingencies here despite years of consistent exposure