Color Matching Experiment Essay

From the moment you awaken to the moment of you fall asleep your eyes help your brain collect the images of the world. From different structures to sizes, difference in distance, variations, and most intriguing, color. Color is the reflection of light from an object or source. But how is color gathered and interpreted by our brains? We are able to see objects by the reflection of light an object emits which passes through different structures in our eyes. Light passes first through the cornea, lens, and pupil, which are located in the front part of the eye. The light then moves to the back of the eye where the retina is located. Contained in the retina are sensory receptors called rods and cones, also known as photoreceptors. When

The strength of the signals received by the cones can be interpreted by the brain as visible color. When light hits the retina it can cause a simulation of cones combining to form different colors other than red, green, and blue. Helmholtz conducted experiments to prove the theory, for example, the color matching experiment where subjects would change the amounts of three different wavelengths of light to match a given color. The subjects were not able to match the colors using only two wavelengths but could match every color of the spectrum using three. 70 years after the Young-Helmholtz Theory was proposed, the identification of the three cone receptors was discovered, they learned that cone pigments had different level of absorption due to the amount of opsin amino acid in the receptor. The Trichromatic Theory helps explain the most common form of color blindness today, which is red-green blindness. People with this form of color blindness have normal blue sensitive cones, but their other cones are either red or green sensitive so they cannot differentiate the two. Although the Trichromatic Theory explains the interaction of cones and color it does not explain all aspects of color