R. Shamey, R. G. KuehniPioneers of Color Sciencehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30811-1_82

82. Hurvich, Leo Maurice 1910–2009

Renzo Shamey¹ and Rolf G. Kuehni¹

(1)

Color Science and Imaging Laboratory, North Carolina State University, Wilson College of Textiles, Raleigh, NC, USA

Renzo Shamey (Corresponding author)

Email: rshamey@ncsu.edu

Rolf G. Kuehni

Email: rolf_kuehni@ncsu.edu

82.1 Experiments on Opponent-Color Vision Theory

References

../images/336076_1_En_82_Chapter/336076_1_En_82_Figa_HTML.png — dla.library.upen.edu

Leo Maurice Hurvich was born in Malden, Massachusetts on September 11, 1910. He obtained his undergraduate and doctoral degrees (1936) from Harvard University. He remained at Harvard as a researcher until 1947, investigating distance perception with his future wife Dorothea Jameson and others, a subject of particular interest during the Second World War. The couple (they married in 1948) was invited by Ralph Evans of Eastman Kodak to join company’s color technology division as research psychologists to study color perception. In 1957, they moved to New York where Hurvich assumed the position of chair of undergraduate psychology at New York University. The next step was a move to the Psychology Department at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia where he remained until his retirement in 1979. He was a fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences and, among other things, a member of the National Academy of Science. He and his wife were recipients of the 1972 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association. Hurvich remained active in the field of color until the end of the century. He died in New York on April 25, 2007 [1].

82.1 Experiments on Opponent-Color Vision Theory

Hurvich and Dorothea Jameson published some 95 papers on many aspects of color science. Over the years, they broadly investigated the perceptual aspects of hue, saturation, and brightness of colors. In 1981, Hurvich published his book Color vision that was an influential, wide-ranging text on the subject [2].

In the mid-twentieth century, Hurvich and Jameson became interested in Hering’s theory of four primary hues. In 1955/1956, they published four articles on various quantitative aspects of an opponent-color theory, followed in 1957 by a summary article “An opponent-process theory of color vision.” These efforts and the English translation in 1964 of E. Hering’s Grundzüge der Lehre vom Lichtsinne (1905) as Outlines of a theory of the light sense [3] made Hurvich and Jameson the main proponents of their generation of an opponent-color theory of color vision. As described and illustrated in Hurvich’s Color vision, a complex optical apparatus made it possible for observers to establish objective experimental data determining how much of a stimulus representing a unique hue it took to cancel the color appearance of a second opposing unique hue. While there was inter-observer variability in the results, a general picture emerged (Fig. 82.1).

../images/336076_1_En_82_Chapter/336076_1_En_82_Fig1_HTML.png — Fig. 82.1
One observer’s chromatic and achromatic (White) spectral responses in terms of unique hues [2]

The locations of the unique hue stimuli were determined to be approximately 475 nm for blue, 500 nm for green, 580 nm for yellow, with red located near the end of the spectrum. The general idea of an opponent-color process was also supported by neurological results indicating the presence in the brain of color-opponent neurons. However, it has become evident that the human visual system has a more complex neurological basis. Multiple mathematical models of the opponent-color theory based on cone sensitivity or color-matching functions have been developed by various authors since that time. A neurophysiologically supported model is still lacking at this time.