Color Opponency and Afterimages

Color afterimages show how the brain uses opponent color signals to process vision. Human color vision can separate millions of hues, even though it depends on fairly simple hardware. A key part of that ability comes from an opponent system in the brain.

In an opponent system, the presence of one...

Human color vision is impressive, and can help us see?and distinguish between?over a million distinct hues. Psychologists use a visual illusion called the color afterimage to study our perception of color.

What a person perceives as the hue of objects they encounter, like an orange, starts with sensory information received by the eyes.