Putting Color Representation in Context, a Cognitive Science Speaker Series Presentation
Speaker: Will Davies, Ph.D.
Title: Putting Color Representation in Context
Short Bio: Will Davies is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and Gabriele Taylor Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St Anne’s College. For 2025-26, he is Visiting Associate Professor at MIT. He works primarily in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, with particular interests in visual perception and psychiatry. He is completing a book titled ‘Color, Space, and Form,’ which describes the interdependencies between color perception and object perception, developing ideas from Gestalt psychology, and connecting these with contemporary neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy.
Abstract: Philosophical work on color has been greatly shaped by opponent-process theory (OPT). OPT holds that color is represented in an axis-coordinate format, with three-part vehicles encoding coordinate values along red-green, yellow-blue, and white-black axes. This format is form-blind, being insensitive to spatial-objectual structure at the point of encoding. This paper argues that early cortex instead represents colors in a form-indexed way. Two major reorientations follow: first, OPT’s core commitment of a form-blind chromatic code fails. Second, the positive replacement is not a tidy three-axis vehicle, but a filter-bank format: a bank of mechanisms tuned to hue × luminance × orientation × spatial frequency (and more). Decoders may extract a 3D readout from the bank, but the representational geometry will be context-dependent, rather than structured by fixed axes. Often, readouts will encode more than three dimensions, thus undermining a central pillar of color theory.
ASL-English interpreters have been requested. Light refreshments will be provided.
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