Binocular Perception of an Abstract Multicolored Display through One Red-Filtered Eye and One Green-Filtered Eye

Abstract

When 17 participants identified the colors in Moutoussis and Zeki's 2000 “Mondrian” display through monocular red and green filters of narrow bandwidth, 98.4% of the colors were identified as the same hue when viewed by both eyes and by one of the two eyes, and the other 1.6% were identified as adjacent hues. Notably, for 11 participants, some reddish patches observed through the red-filtered eye and some greenish patches observed through the green-filtered eye were binocularly experienced as belonging to the “Mondrian” display as a multicolored whole. Such findings call into question Moutoussis and Zeki's conclusion that the binocularly experienced colors of the “Mondrian” display are cortically generated following the synthesis of monocular information. These findings suggest, instead, that the binocularly experienced patches of color are pieced together from some patches of color generated by the red-filtered eye and other patches of color generated by the green-filtered eye.