European Resesarch Council Projects

One of the main funders of our research has been the European Research Council.

Read on to find out more about our ERC funded projects.

Project COLOURMIND: the Environment and Colour Perception

Project COLOURMIND was funded with a €2 million ERC Consolidator Grant (to Prof. Franklin, with Jenny Bosten) and ran from 2018-2025. The project investigated the relationship of colour perception with statistical regularities in the colours of natural scenes (chromatic scene statistics) and illumination. The project used a combination of fieldwork (in Ecuadorian rainforest, urban and Arctic environments), psychophysics, hyperspectral imaging, fMRI, Altered-Reality (with VR) and infant testing. We have so far published 16 papers, reviews and chapters from the project, with more papers in the pipeline. Key findings from the project are that colour vision is aligned with chromatic scene statistics from as early as 4-months (Skelton et al., 2023), that sensitivity to colour aligns with the chromatic statistics of people's 'visual diet' (Skelton, Maule et al., 2024), and that colour perception varies with latitude and season - for example, perceived white varies with geographical latitude at time of testing and at time of birth (Maule, Skelton, Garside et al., in prep). Overall the project suggests that colour perception calibrates to the environment on multiple timescales.

ColourSpot: the Development and Evaluation of a test of Colour Vision Deficiency for young children and older

Anna Franklin and Jenny Bosten were funded by the European Research Council to develop and evaluate a new test of Colour Vision Deficiency (colour blindness) suitable for young children (proof of concept project COLOURTEST). We worked with the app company Milo to design an animated iPad game and embedded our own psychophysics and iPad colour calibrations. We then tested the resulting app, ColourSpot, on 800 4-7 year old boys and showed that the test classifies colour vision deficiency in children more decisively than the commonly used test. The app has several benefits over other tests - it can be self administered remotely by a teacher or parent, is easily accessible and does not require specialist equipment. Our ambition is to obtain regulatory approval for ColourSpot so that it can be used to screen children for colour vision deficiency when they start school.

Project CATEGORIES: The Origin and Nature of Colour Categorisation

The CATEGORIES project, led by Prof Franklin, ran from 2012-2018 and was funded with a £1.2million grant from the ERC. The interdisciplinary project investigated how humans categorise colour, the development of these categories, their impact on perception and their neural representation. The project resulted in over 20 publications including 3 in PNAS. Three key findings of the project were that: i) infants categorise colour using the two neural subsystems that underpin colour representation (Skelton et al., 2017, PNAS); ii) the middle frontal gyrus categorises colour even when passively viewed (Bird et al., 2014, PNAS); and iii) colour categories affect perception (e.g., Forder et al., 2017, Scientific Reports) and aesthetics (Alvaro et al., 2015, PNAS), but there is limited evidence that they affect sensory processes (He et al., 2014, JOSA), and speakers of different colour lexicons are highly similar in their perception of colour (Wright et al., 2014, JECP).

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