Abstract
Why is it that we perceive a richly coloured world everywhere in our visual field, even though the colour signals provided by the peripheral retina are quite poor? In a sensory - motor approach, visual experience derives from acquired knowledge of the laws coupling sensory inputs with the observeramp;amp;amp;lsquo;s movements. In our experiment, subjects are asked to pursue a figure on a screen, while the whole screen colour (or luminance) changes according to the position of the figure. Even if, at every moment, the screen is homogenous, a strong gradation effect appears, suggesting that colour perception in periphery is strongly affected by prior knowledge acquired during visual exploration. We investigate whether this gradation effect is compatible with our sensory - motor theory, and in particular whether, after a long adaptation to the systematic colour/gaze-direction correlation, the effect disappears, as the theory would predict.
