Adaptive summary processing of color and brightness.

The objects we encounter in everyday settings are composed of multicolored surfaces. To utilize the color information of these surfaces, it is necessary to efficiently summarize the color distribution of object surfaces. Studies examining such summarization (averaging) processes have shown that the three attributes of color -- hue, saturation, and brightness -- are averaged in different manners. Hue can be averaged accurately and approximated by the arithmetic mean on the uniform chromaticity scale diagram. Averaging of saturation exhibits a bias, with the average tending to shift towards a more saturated direction than the colorimetric mean. Furthermore, this bias becomes more pronounced when there is greater variability (noise) in the color distribution. While there is also a bias observed in the averaging of brightness, the underlying processing strategy seems to be adaptively adjusted depending on the task at hand. These summarizing strategies are believed to be acquired to enhance the reliability and certainty of sensory information in noisy natural environments. Identifying the factors that determine these processing strategies remains a challenge for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]