If you lived your whole life under sodium vapor light, you just wouldn’t have a notion of color. You would know which objects were bright or dark, and so get low predictive error.
If you walked into a windowless room you had never been in before, and your wearing gloves so you can’t look at your hands etc, then you wouldn’t know if the lighting was high CRI or not.
This would be the worst case scenario and corresponds to a low CRI, whereas a high CRI light would give you better information about the colors present in the environment.
Better information leads to less guesswork by your visual system and minimizing prediction error might be something preferred by your mind.
RGB light (like from a white computer screen) provides just as much color info, it’s just slightly different info.
So this only makes any sense if you are comparing the same objects, under different CRI lighting conditions, which could cause your predictions to be slightly worse.
This theory would also seem to predict that wearing tinted sunglasses would be intensely unpleasant. Which doesn’t seem like a good prediction.
My point was that if you were trying to infer ‘true’ surface reflectance of objects under daylight, while only having luminance info from a single wavelegth light source, you would end up with high prediction error about the properties of those surfaces.
So yes, I was only referring to the case where the observer has a reference with which to compare the objects to. I did not have in mind the case where we would be naive observers having 0 experience with the world around us. My suggestion was motivated by my intuition about our everyday experience, and not meant to be an absolute truth about human biology.
In response to tinted sunglasses, I would venture that you would not wear them if you were trying to perform a task that involved ‘accurate’ color perception e.g. going to an art museum, watching a movie, seeing a sunset. As an aside, I do avoid them because I enjoy my sense of color perception in general.
If you lived your whole life under sodium vapor light, you just wouldn’t have a notion of color. You would know which objects were bright or dark, and so get low predictive error.
If you walked into a windowless room you had never been in before, and your wearing gloves so you can’t look at your hands etc, then you wouldn’t know if the lighting was high CRI or not.
RGB light (like from a white computer screen) provides just as much color info, it’s just slightly different info.
So this only makes any sense if you are comparing the same objects, under different CRI lighting conditions, which could cause your predictions to be slightly worse.
This theory would also seem to predict that wearing tinted sunglasses would be intensely unpleasant. Which doesn’t seem like a good prediction.
My point was that if you were trying to infer ‘true’ surface reflectance of objects under daylight, while only having luminance info from a single wavelegth light source, you would end up with high prediction error about the properties of those surfaces.
So yes, I was only referring to the case where the observer has a reference with which to compare the objects to. I did not have in mind the case where we would be naive observers having 0 experience with the world around us. My suggestion was motivated by my intuition about our everyday experience, and not meant to be an absolute truth about human biology.
In response to tinted sunglasses, I would venture that you would not wear them if you were trying to perform a task that involved ‘accurate’ color perception e.g. going to an art museum, watching a movie, seeing a sunset. As an aside, I do avoid them because I enjoy my sense of color perception in general.