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Trichromatic color vision is the ability of humans and some other animals to see different colors, mediated by interactions among three types of color-sensing cone cells. The trichromatic color theory began in the 18th century, when Thomas Young proposed that color vision was a result of three different photoreceptor cells .
The four pigments in a bird's cone cells (in this example, estrildid finches) extend the range of color vision into the ultraviolet. [1]Tetrachromacy (from Greek tetra, meaning "four" and chroma, meaning "color") is the condition of possessing four independent channels for conveying color information, or possessing four types of cone cell in the eye.
The gamut of the human color vision is bounded by optimal colors. They are the most chromatic colors that humans are able to see. The emission or reflectance spectrum of a color is the amount of light of each wavelength that it emits or reflects, in proportion to a given maximum, which has the value of 1 (100%). If the emission or reflectance ...
Birds, however, can see some red wavelengths, although not as far into the light spectrum as humans. [46] It is a myth that the common goldfish is the only animal that can see both infrared and ultraviolet light; [47] their color vision extends into the ultraviolet but not the infrared. [48]
The spectrum does not contain all the colors that the human visual system can distinguish. Unsaturated colors such as pink, or purple variations like magenta, for example, are absent because they can only be made from a mix of multiple wavelengths. Colors containing only one wavelength are also called pure colors or spectral colors. [8] [9]
Thomas Young and Hermann von Helmholtz assumed that the eye's retina consists of three different kinds of light receptors for red, green and blue.. The Young–Helmholtz theory (based on the work of Thomas Young and Hermann von Helmholtz in the 19th century), also known as the trichromatic theory, is a theory of trichromatic color vision – the manner in which the visual system gives rise to ...
Today, most mammals possess dichromatic vision, corresponding to protanopia red–green color blindness. They can thus see violet, blue, green and yellow light, but cannot see ultraviolet or deep red light. [5] [6] This was probably a feature of the first mammalian ancestors, which were likely small, nocturnal, and burrowing.
For example, the Arctic fox has a white coat in winter (containing little pigment), and a brown coat in summer (containing more pigment), an example of seasonal camouflage (a polyphenism). Many animals, including mammals , birds , and amphibians , are unable to synthesize most of the pigments that colour their fur or feathers, other than the ...