The subjective metric of remembered colors: A Fisher-information analysis of the geometry of human chromatic memory

Abstract

In order to explore the metric structure of the space of remembered colors, a computer game was designed, where players with normal color vision had to store a color in memory, and later retrieve it by selecting the best match out of a continuum of alternatives. All tested subjects exhibited evidence of focal colors in their mnemonic strategy. We found no concluding evidence that the focal colors of different players tended to cluster around universal prototypes. Based on the Fisher metric, for each subject we defined a notion of distance in color space that captured the accuracy with which similar colors where discriminated or confounded when stored and retrieved from memory. The notions of distance obtained for different players were remarkably similar. Finally, for each player, we constructed a new color scale, in which colors are memorized and retrieved with uniform accuracy.